Squeeze a PDF down toward 100KB for tight upload limits on government portals and job applications. Two compression levels, with the resulting size shown before you download.
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Trying to upload a PDF but the file size is too large? Our compressor reduces your file as far as it can and shows you the result before you download, so you can see whether you have cleared the limit you are up against.
Not on demand — and it is worth being straight about that, because plenty of tools imply otherwise. There is no field to type a target size into, and the compressor does not retry to land on a number. You choose a compression level, and what you get depends on what is inside your document. A text-heavy file at the Extreme level will often land near or under 100KB. A high-resolution scan may not get there at all, because there is a floor to how far page images can be compressed while remaining legible.
Start with the Extreme level, which downsamples the images inside your PDF to 72 DPI and strips non-essential metadata. Check the before-and-after size shown in the preview. If you are still over the limit, the remaining weight is almost certainly image data — so consider removing pages you do not need, or splitting the document and uploading it in parts. Compressing an already-compressed file a second time rarely helps.
Many government portals, job applications, and older email gateways enforce strict 100KB or 200KB caps, usually because the systems behind them were built around much smaller documents. The cap is rarely negotiable, which is why getting a scanned form under it is such a common problem.
No. Compression runs on an external compression service: your PDF is sent over an encrypted HTTPS connection, compressed, and returned to your browser. If a document must not leave your machine, use one of our browser-only tools instead, such as merge, split or watermark.
Yes, some — compression works by re-encoding the images inside your PDF, which is lossy. Real text and vector graphics are not re-rendered and stay sharp, so a text document survives it far better than a scan does. At the Extreme level, images are downsampled to 72 DPI, which is visible if you zoom in.
Then the file has more image data than the limit allows. Remove any pages you do not need, split the document into parts, or re-scan the original at a lower resolution rather than compressing a high-resolution scan after the fact.