Compress a PDF to a specific file size
PDF upload limits show up on visa applications, court filings, job portals and university submissions. Unlike images, a PDF's size is usually dominated by one thing — the images embedded inside it — and that determines whether your target is achievable at all.
Open the PDF tool →Common PDF upload caps and whether they are realistic
| Target size | Typical use | Realistic for |
|---|---|---|
| 100KB | Government e-filing portals | A text-only document of a few pages. A scanned page will not fit without heavy quality loss. |
| 200KB | Visa and immigration uploads | One or two scanned pages at reduced resolution, or a longer text-only PDF. |
| 300KB | University applications | A short scanned document, or a text PDF with a few small images. |
| 500KB | Job application portals | A typical scanned multi-page document at readable quality. |
| 1MB | General document uploads | Comfortable for most real documents, scanned or otherwise. |
| 2MB | Court filings, contract submission | Enough for a long scanned document without visible degradation. |
| 5MB | Portfolio and report uploads | Rarely a constraint unless the PDF contains full-page photography. |
| 10MB | Email attachment ceilings | Most documents are already well under this; if not, the images inside are oversized. |
Text-only PDFs are already small
If your PDF was exported from a word processor and contains no images, it is probably already tens of kilobytes and compression will barely move it. There is very little to remove — the text is stored as glyph references, not pixels. If a text-only PDF is somehow several megabytes, the cause is usually embedded fonts or a scanned page hiding among the text pages.
Scanned documents are images in a wrapper
A scanned PDF is a stack of photographs of paper. Its size is set by the scan resolution: 600 DPI colour produces files several times larger than 200 DPI greyscale, with no readability benefit for ordinary text. Rescanning at a lower DPI, or in greyscale rather than colour, will usually beat any amount of after-the-fact compression.
When the target is not achievable
A 20-page colour scan will not compress to 100KB in any readable form. If a portal demands it, the intended answer is almost always to submit fewer pages, or to submit a text-based PDF rather than a scan. Compressing until it fits will produce a document the reviewer cannot read, which fails for a different reason.
Common questions
Will compressing break the text layer?
No. Text stays selectable and searchable. Compression targets the embedded images, which is where the size actually lives.
Why did my PDF barely shrink?
Because it was already efficient — usually a text-only export with nothing left to remove. Large savings only exist where large images do.
Is the file uploaded to a server?
No. Processing happens in your browser; the document never leaves your device.