The Disability Law Ambush: How Return-to-Office Met the ADA and Lost

For three years, corporate real estate departments have been on a crusade. Executives wanted people back in offices. Consultants were paid handsomely to justify it. Landlords had mortgages to protect. And so the return-to-office mandate became, for many companies, less a suggestion than a diktat.

Then came the law.

What began as scattered accommodation requests from employees has escalated into a full-blown legal collision that is forcing employers to confront an uncomfortable reality: the Americans with Disabilities Act does not care about your lease obligations. And it has teeth.

In 2025 alone, plaintiffs filed nearly 6,800 disability accommodation cases in federal court—a 42 percent year-over-year increase. Disability claims now appear in over 40 percent of all EEOC merit lawsuits. The pattern is unmistakable. As companies have tightened return-to-office policies, workers with disabilities—or their lawyers—have increasingly turned to federal law as their only recourse.

This is not a peripheral issue. Sixty-one percent of U.S. organizations have RTO policies in place. Nearly half of those say they intend to discipline or terminate employees who fail to comply. That creates a legal minefield most companies constructed without realizing it.

The problem, from a legal standpoint, is elegantly simple. The ADA does not require employers to offer telework to anyone. But once an employer offers remote work as an option—even a limited one—it cannot eliminate that category of accommodation through blanket policy. More critically, the reasonable accommodation obligation may require employers to modify telework programs specifically for someone with a disability.

In plain English: You cannot say everyone must come in because you decided everyone must come in. You have to evaluate whether someone with a disability can do their job from home.

Companies are learning this at scale. In February 2026, Geisinger Health agreed to pay $450,000 to settle an EEOC lawsuit alleging it maintained policies denying reasonable accommodations, including limiting job-protected leave to rigid durations and forcing employees returning from medical leave to compete for their own positions. That was healthcare—supposedly the industry most attuned to disability. Two DOJ attorneys filed a lawsuit in June alleging return-to-office orders violated the Rehabilitation Act. One has Type 1 diabetes and severe migraines. The other has Stage IV lung cancer and immunocompromise. These are not edge cases. These are people who cannot safely commute, cannot safely sit in crowded offices, and whose employers told them it did not matter.

The EEOC released guidance on telework accommodations for federal employees in recent months, guidance that reflects principles applying equally to private employers under the ADA. The message was clear: telework can be a reasonable accommodation. Categorically refusing it is legally dangerous.

What makes this collision so revealing is not the law itself—the ADA has existed for three decades. It is the carelessness with which companies implemented their mandates. Most RTO decisions appear to have been made by real estate and finance teams with minimal involvement from HR or legal counsel. The assumption was that the pandemic was an aberration, that normalcy meant offices, and that employees who objected would simply comply or leave.

They did not account for the fact that millions of workers with disabilities had, for the first time, accessed environments in which they could actually be productive. They did not anticipate that these workers would have legal recourse. And they certainly did not imagine that their hard-line stance would generate the kind of litigation volume now flooding federal dockets.

The practical outcome is that the most aggressive RTO mandates are being carved out, one settlement at a time. Companies are discovering that real estate recovery plans do not supersede civil rights obligations. Accommodations that were categorically denied are now being grandfathered in as litigation risks that exceed the value of the office real estate they were meant to protect.

This is not a story about disability rights advocacy—though it is also that. It is a story about employers who made a business decision without consulting the law, and then discovered, too late, that the law had other ideas.

The irony is almost too clean: The return to the office, for many workers, ends in a courtroom and a settlement check.