Your employer wants you re-assessed. The £882 bill isn't yours.

A private dyslexia diagnostic assessment costs up to £882 through the British Dyslexia Association's chartered psychologist service (BDA, verified July 2026). If your employer has just told you your existing diagnosis "isn't sufficient" and wants a fresh assessment before your adjustments continue, that's the bill they're pointing at. You don't have to pay it, and in most cases you don't have to get reassessed at all before your employer keeps adjusting your work.

The legal duty doesn't reset when your employer has doubts

Under Sections 20 and 21 of the Equality Act 2010, the duty to make reasonable adjustments is triggered once an employer knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, that you're disabled. Dyslexia counts. That knowledge doesn't expire when a manager changes or a new HR contact starts asking questions.

Acas is explicit about who carries the cost once that duty exists: "The employer is responsible for paying for any reasonable adjustments" (Acas, reasonable adjustments guidance, last updated 30 January 2025). If adjustments were already agreed and are already working, your employer disputing the underlying diagnosis doesn't switch that funding responsibility onto you.

A new manager's skepticism, or a general policy of "we don't recognize old assessments," isn't a recognized exception in the Act. The duty is about substantial disadvantage in the job today, not the paperwork's print date.

Evidence that your employer already knew usually exists somewhere in writing, even if nobody calls it that at the time. Look for:

• An HR file note, occupational health report, or onboarding form recording your dyslexia or the adjustments agreed.
• Emails where a manager confirmed extra time, proofing support, or format changes because of your dyslexia.
• A performance review that references adjustments already in use, even briefly.
• Access to Work correspondence or an existing grant, since applying required disclosing the condition to the DWP and usually to the employer too.

Any one of these is normally enough to establish the employer's knowledge without a fresh diagnostic assessment. Gather what you have before you reply to the reassessment demand, not after.

So if adjustments are already running and your employer pauses them pending a new assessment, that pause is the part worth challenging, not a neutral administrative step.

If your employer wants a second opinion, they can ask, but they pay

An employer is entitled to seek independent confirmation. The usual route is an occupational health referral, not a demand that you personally book and fund a private reassessment. Those are two different processes with two different bills.

Acas's guidance on who pays for reasonable adjustments doesn't carve out an exception for assessments the employer wants for its own reassurance. The cost sits with the employer, the same as any other adjustment (Acas, 30 January 2025). If a private provider is quoting you directly for the test, that's a sign the request is being run the wrong way.

Ask for the referral in writing, addressed to occupational health, at the company's expense. Confirm in the same message that your current adjustments continue while that review takes place.

So if HR proposes "get reassessed and we'll revisit," the reasonable answer is: refer me to occupational health at the company's cost, and keep the current adjustments running while that happens.

What if there was never a formal diagnosis in the first place

Some employees never had a full diagnostic assessment. Adjustments were agreed years ago based on a school report, a screening result, or a manager simply accepting a description of the difficulty. An employer can still try to use this gap to argue the duty never applied.

It doesn't work that way. Acas guidance confirms a formal diagnosis has never been a legal precondition for the duty to make reasonable adjustments; what matters is whether the employer knew, or ought reasonably to have known, that you were disabled (Acas, updated January 2025). A manager who accepted a description of your difficulty and adjusted your work around it has already supplied that knowledge.

Where there's genuinely no record and no prior acceptance, a fresh assessment stops being a hostile move and becomes a reasonable way to establish the facts. The distinction that matters is whether your employer is disputing evidence that was never there, or disputing evidence they already accepted and acted on.

So the question to ask yourself first is not "do I need to get retested," but "did my employer already know, and did they already act on it." If the answer is yes, the burden of proof has already shifted away from you.

The US position: the EEOC says employers pay for exams they require

The ADA doesn't require a fresh assessment before an employer keeps an accommodation in place. EEOC enforcement guidance on disability-related inquiries and medical examinations, issued July 2000 and still the EEOC's current position as of 2026, states that if an employer requires an employee to see a health professional of the employer's choosing, the employer pays for that visit.

An employer can ask for documentation sufficient to substantiate the disability and the accommodation need. Once that evidence exists, though, repeated demands for further documentation or a fresh exam can shade into retaliation under the same EEOC guidance, unless the employer has a good-faith reason to think the existing documentation is no longer sufficient.

For a US employee with an accommodation already in place, an employer who demands a retest at the employee's expense, on pain of losing that accommodation, has skipped past what the ADA's own guidance requires.

The EEOC recorded 1,345 charges citing learning disabilities in fiscal year 2023, and a failure to properly run the interactive process, the back-and-forth an employer is supposed to have with an employee about accommodation needs, is a recurring feature in these charges (EEOC, FY2023 data, published January 2024). Skipping straight to "get reassessed at your own cost or lose the accommodation" is exactly the kind of shortcut that turns into a charge.

So under the ADA, a demand that you personally fund a new evaluation, on pain of losing an accommodation you already have, is the wrong process, not a paperwork formality.

What this means for you

Put the employer's demand in writing before you do anything else, even if it was first raised verbally. Ask two things in the same message: confirmation that your current adjustments continue unchanged while any review happens, and confirmation of who is arranging and paying for that review.

If your employer wants a second opinion, direct them toward an occupational health referral (UK) or their own chosen medical evaluation (US), not a private assessment invoice addressed to you. That single distinction, who commissions it and who pays, is where most of these disputes actually turn.

A real example

A financial analyst, diagnosed at 22, disclosed to a previous manager who agreed two adjustments: extra proofing time on client reports and a standing exception from cold-call rotas. Three years later a new manager took over the team and asked for "updated documentation" before continuing either adjustment.

The analyst replied in writing the same day: the adjustments had been in place for three years with no gap, the manager change didn't reset that history, and any request for a fresh opinion would need to go through occupational health at the company's cost. HR confirmed the adjustments would continue two days later and dropped the reassessment request entirely.

Nothing about that exchange required a solicitor, an EEOC charge, or a tribunal claim. It required a same-day email that named the Equality Act duty directly and put the cost question back where it belonged.

For an independent, funded assessment on your own terms, check a workplace needs assessment funded through Access to Work before paying for anything privately. For the cost and process of a diagnostic assessment, what a dyslexia assessment actually costs covers current UK pricing. US readers can compare ADA and Equality Act timelines side by side in the ADA accommodations guide.

So the move today is an email confirming your adjustments continue, not a booking for an £882 test you didn't ask for.