PDF size limits of common services
There is no single limit. Every service picks its own, most of them do not tell you until the upload fails, and a few of the numbers everybody repeats are wrong.
Figures checked on 2026-09-11. Services change these without announcing it. If one of them is now wrong, it is wrong here too — the date is so you know how much to trust it.
The limits, with where each number comes from
Every figure below was read from the service's own documentation on the date shown. Where a service does not publish a number, this says so instead of guessing — a table that invents one limit is worth nothing on the other forty.
| Service | Limit | What it actually means | source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gmail | 25 MB | Everything in the message together, not per file. Above it, Gmail swaps the attachment for a Drive link. | 2026-09-11 |
| WhatsApp, as a document | 2 GB | A PDF sent as a document keeps its quality and is not compressed. | 2026-09-11 |
| WhatsApp, as media | 16 MB | Photos, video and voice. This is the one people hit, because sending a video from the gallery sends it as media. | 2026-09-11 |
| Brazil — e-SAJ | 2 MB per document | 10 MB for the whole filing. Used by the São Paulo courts and several others. | 2026-09-11 |
| Brazil — PJe | 10 MB | Since version 1.6. Individual courts set lower limits — 5 MB is common — so check the one you are filing in. | 2026-09-11 |
| Brazil — labour courts | 2 MB per document | Set by TST Instrução Normativa 30/2007. | 2026-09-11 |
| Not published | LinkedIn does not state a figure for document posts. Unverified — treat anything over 100 MB as a risk. | not verified | |
| USCIS | Not verified here | The forms vary and the published figures move. Check the specific form's page before filing. | not verified |
Why the number everybody repeats for WhatsApp is wrong
You will read that WhatsApp accepts 64 MB. It does not, and it never did — that figure belongs to a different service. WhatsApp has two limits, and which one applies depends on how the file is sent, not on what the file is.
Sent as media — the way a video goes when you pick it from the gallery, with a preview and playback in the conversation — the limit is 16 MB. Sent as a document, from the attachment menu, it is 2 GB, and the file is not re-compressed at all.
So the same video can be refused one way and accepted the other. If quality matters, send it as a document. If it has to play inline, it has to fit in 16 MB.
Why a scan is so much bigger than the same pages typed
A PDF made by a word processor stores letters: the page is a set of instructions for drawing text, and a hundred pages of it can weigh less than a megabyte. A PDF made by a scanner stores a photograph of each page, and a photograph of a page of text is an expensive way to store text.
That is why a five-page scan can be 20 MB while a fifty-page contract is 300 KB. It is also why compressing a scan works so well — there is enormous redundancy in a picture of white paper — and why compressing a text PDF barely does anything, because there is almost nothing to throw away.
Getting under a limit without ruining the document
For a scan, lowering the resolution of the embedded images is the whole game, and 150 DPI is the point where a page still prints cleanly and reads perfectly on screen. Most scanners default to 300 or 600, which is more than a page of text ever needs.
For a text PDF that is still too big, the weight is usually in embedded fonts or in one photograph somebody dropped in. Splitting is often better than compressing: a filing system that takes 2 MB per document usually takes several documents.
What not to do: printing to PDF from a preview, or screenshotting the pages. Both turn text back into pictures, which is how a 400 KB document becomes 12 MB.
Compress it here
It runs in this tab — the file is not uploaded anywhere, including to this site.