Shrink your PDF to under 5MB automatically, for portals that cap each document at five megabytes.
Five megabytes is the middle ground of upload limits, and the most forgiving of the common caps. It accommodates a reasonable number of scanned pages without forcing the aggressive compression that a 2MB limit demands, which is why so many application portals settle on it.
It turns up across immigration and visa systems, professional licensing bodies, grant applications and procurement portals. If a form does not state its limit, 5MB is a sensible guess at what it will tolerate.
At this size most scanned documents keep their legibility comfortably. A twenty-page scan compressed to 5MB is still perfectly readable, and often indistinguishable from the original on screen.
Almost always, images. A PDF holding nothing but text is remarkably small — a hundred pages of plain text might be under a megabyte, because the text is stored as characters and font instructions rather than as a picture of words.
The moment scanned pages or photographs enter the document, that changes. A phone camera photograph of a single page can be three or four megabytes on its own, and a scanner set to 600 dpi produces files of a similar size per page. Ten scanned pages and you are comfortably past most upload limits.
This is why the same page count can produce wildly different file sizes, and why compressing a text-only PDF achieves almost nothing while compressing a scanned one can cut it by ninety per cent. It also explains the usual surprise: a document that looks identical to another is ten times the size, because one was typed and the other photographed.
Most tools give you three vague presets — low, medium, high — and leave you to guess which one lands under your limit. That turns into a cycle of compress, check, try again, which is maddening when a portal has already rejected you once.
This one works backwards from the number instead. It compresses, measures the result, and adjusts, closing in on the target across several passes until it finds the highest quality that still fits. You get a file just under the limit rather than one needlessly far below it, which matters because every megabyte you give away is detail you did not need to lose.
If the first result is not what you wanted you can set your own figure, in kilobytes, and run it again.
The documents people compress are rarely trivial. They are contracts, medical records, bank statements, immigration paperwork and identity documents. Sending those to a stranger’s server to save a few megabytes is a poor trade, however reputable the site looks and whatever its deletion policy claims.
This page reads your PDF in your browser, rewrites it in memory and hands it back. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored, and there is no server log with your document in it, because there is no server involved. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the internet entirely and it will still work — which is a straightforward way to check the claim rather than take it on trust.
Drop your PDF above and press Compress. The file is reduced until it fits under 5MB, then offered back as a download. You can set a different target if your form wants something else.
No. The whole thing runs inside your browser, so your document never leaves your computer. That matters for contracts, bank statements and identity papers.
Yes. Text and vector content are left alone; the savings come from the images inside the document, which are re-encoded at a lower resolution. A scanned page will look slightly softer, but it stays legible.
If the file is already under 5MB, it is handed back untouched rather than being re-compressed. Re-compressing an already small file usually makes it larger, not smaller.
Some documents cannot physically get that small — a hundred pages of high-resolution scans has a floor. When that happens you get the smallest version achievable, with its real size shown, so you can decide whether to split the document instead.
No hard limit. Because the work happens on your own machine, the practical ceiling is your device’s memory. Very large scanned documents on an older phone may be slow.