Tablet app development cost for government & public sector

There is no single figure, and quoting one would be the least useful thing this page could do — the same pairing spans several-fold depending on scope, compliance and how many surfaces you ship. What this page gives you instead is what the pairing demands: the regimes that may apply, the systems of record you will be asked to integrate with, the device matrix and the release path. The calculator below is already fixed to Tablet and government & public sector — answer what is left and it returns a cost range, hours, timeline, team and running costs for your scope.

Because government & public sector brings its own obligations before you write a feature: Section 508 / WCAG 2.2 AA, FedRAMP, SOC 2 Type II may apply, you will be asked to integrate with systems like Login.gov / ID.me and Government payment gateway, and there are typically 5 distinct roles rather than one. The platform contributes its own separate costs — the device matrix, App Store & Google Play review — and those are independent of the industry.

On both platforms, yes, technically. Whether you should depends on who uses it. For a consumer app where tablet is 5% of sessions, scaled phone layouts are a reasonable interim and cost nothing. For field, clinical, retail or education software the tablet IS the primary device, and a stretched phone UI wastes the screen that justified buying tablets. Apple also treats a phone-shaped iPad app as a review comment, so if you claim iPad support you need real iPad layouts.

Because the interaction model changes, not just the dimensions. A phone screen shows one thing; a tablet shows a list beside a detail beside a inspector. That means new navigation patterns, split views, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, pointer hover states and a layout that survives being run at a third of the screen in split-screen. Expect design to grow more than implementation — typically 1.5–2× the per-screen design cost of the equivalent phone screen.

Roughly 8–12% if you build with it from the start: semantic structure, focus management, keyboard operation, contrast discipline, screen-reader testing and a published conformance report. Retrofitting it into a finished product costs two to four times that, because the fixes are often structural rather than cosmetic. For public-sector work it is a contractual requirement, so treat it as scope rather than polish.

It is a planning estimate, not a quote. The band shown is roughly plus or minus 15–20% for a well-defined scope, and wider while requirements are still moving. It is built from engineering hours per discipline, converted at our blended delivery rate, so the hours are directly comparable to a real proposal line by line — but a firm price needs a technical specification, which is the step after budgeting.