Compress PDF to 5MB
Or 2MB, 10MB, 25MB — name the limit your email or upload form imposes, and it works out the settings to get under it.
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Text becomes a picture.
Hitting a specific size means re-rendering every page as an image, so the result cannot be searched, selected, or read by a screen reader, and links stop working. That is the only way a browser can steer a PDF to a size. If your file is mostly text, use Compress PDF and pick lossless instead.
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PDF · one file
Your file never leaves your browser during processing
How it works
To compress a PDF to 5MB, drop it onto this page and enter 5 MB as the target — settings are tested on the first page, then the whole document is re-rendered at the resolution that fits, all inside your browser. The same works for any limit you name: 2MB, 10MB, or Gmail’s 25MB.
Attachment limits are the reason most people compress a PDF at all: Gmail stops at 25MB, Outlook defaults to 10MB, and plenty of job portals and government forms cut off at 2MB or 5MB. Knowing the number you need makes the problem specific in a way a general "make it smaller" button does not.
Getting a PDF to a specific size in a browser means rasterising it — every page is re-rendered as a JPEG image and the document is rebuilt around those images. This is stated plainly before you start because it has a real cost: the text becomes part of a picture, so the result cannot be searched or selected, screen readers cannot read it, and links stop working. The alternative, lossless re-saving, has no dial to turn — it produces whatever size it produces. If your document is mostly text, the lossless mode on the main compressor is the better tool, and it will keep everything intact.
Finding the right settings is done on page 1 only. The page is rendered at descending resolutions, and at each one the JPEG quality is narrowed by binary search until the projected whole-document size fits your target. Doing this by compressing the entire document once per candidate would mean rasterising a forty-page file twenty times over, which turns a two-second job into a two-minute one on a phone.
Because page 1 stands in for the whole document, the number shown during the search is a projection, not a measurement. The real full-document pass runs immediately afterwards and the size you are shown at the end is the actual file. If page 1 was unrepresentative — a plain text cover in front of forty dense scans — the result can land over target, and the tool says so rather than quietly handing you a file that still will not send.
Background reading: KB, MB and GB: what “must be under 100 KB” means.
Compress PDF to 5MB
This is the limit people hit most often, and it is almost always someone else’s rule rather than a technical one — job portals, university coursework uploads, visa and government forms, and insurance claim portals converge on 5MB with no obvious reason beyond habit. Press the 5 MB preset and the search starts from there.
A text-heavy document already under about twenty pages usually clears 5MB with the resolution barely dropping, because the pages carry very little image data to begin with. The hard case is a scan: a phone-photographed forty-page contract can arrive at 80MB, and reaching 5MB from there means roughly 100–120 DPI, which stays readable on screen but shows visible softening if printed. If the document is text you generated rather than paper you photographed, the lossless mode on the main PDF compressor is a better trade — it keeps the text selectable and often gets under 5MB anyway.
Compress PDF to 10MB
The 10MB ceiling is the classic Exchange and corporate mail default, so it tends to be the number that matters for work attachments rather than public forms. It is a far gentler target than 5MB: most scanned documents reach it with only a modest resolution drop, and text with embedded figures usually gets there without the images visibly degrading.
Because there is more headroom, this is the target where the projection is most likely to land accurately — the search settles at a higher resolution, where the difference between page 1 and a heavier later page matters proportionally less to the total.
Compress PDF to 2MB
The 2MB limit belongs to older web forms and government portals that never raised their cap, and it is genuinely aggressive for anything scanned. Expect a real quality cost: at this target a page of scanned text can land near 70–90 DPI, where small print starts to break up and a signature can turn mushy.
If a scanned multi-page document will not reach 2MB at a resolution you can still read, the fix is usually to send fewer pages rather than to compress harder. Splitting the document and attaching only the pages the form actually asks for keeps those pages legible, which compressing the whole file to fit never will.
Compress PDF to 25MB for Gmail
Gmail refuses to attach a file over 25MB and offers a Drive link instead, which is fine for a colleague and a problem when the recipient is a form-processing system or someone who will not click a link from an unknown sender. Compressing to 25MB keeps it a real attachment.
25MB is a loose enough target that most documents reach it with a barely perceptible change, which makes it the one preset where rasterising is a mild cost. The trade is still the same one, though — the text stops being selectable — so if the file is already under 25MB there is no reason to run this at all.
FAQ
How do I get a PDF under 5MB to email it?
Drop the file in, press the 5 MB preset, and compress. The tool renders the pages at a lower resolution until the whole document fits under that limit.
Why does the text stop being selectable?
Because reaching a specific size requires turning each page into an image, and an image has no text layer. A browser cannot recompress the pictures inside a PDF while leaving its text intact — that needs a content-stream rewrite the underlying library does not support.
What is the difference between this and Compress PDF?
Compress PDF offers both a lossless re-save that keeps text and a rasterise mode, and lets you drive the settings. This page only rasterises, because only rasterising can be steered toward a size you name.
The result came out over my target. Why?
The settings are chosen by testing page 1 and multiplying by the page count. If later pages are heavier than page 1 — scans following a text cover page, for instance — the projection falls short. Lower the target and run it again.
Is there a limit on the size of PDF I can compress?
Nothing imposed by us, since the file is never uploaded. Your device memory is the ceiling, and very large documents will take longer because every page is rendered.
Is my document uploaded to a server?
No. Rendering and rebuilding both happen in your browser. The counter under the tool monitors network activity during processing and stays at zero bytes uploaded.