Compress PDF to 5 MB

Need to compress a PDF to 5MB or under for a portal upload limit or email attachment? This tool targets 5 MB entirely in your browser.

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Compress PDF to 5 MB now

The email attachment ceiling

5 MB is not really a portal limit — it is the neighbourhood where mail servers and chat apps start refusing attachments, and it is the most common reason someone compresses a PDF that nothing was actually wrong with.

At this size, quality is not the constraint. Almost any document compresses under 5 MB while still looking exactly as it did, so use Keep text and take the smaller reduction.

If a PDF is still over 5 MB after that, it is holding high-resolution scans or embedded photographs. Splitting it into two files often solves the problem better than compression does, and it keeps both halves readable.

Scan mode or Keep text?

This is the only decision that really changes the result, and it depends on what your PDF already contains.

• Keep text leaves the text layer alone and compresses the images around it. The document stays selectable, searchable and copyable. The reduction is smaller, which is fine whenever the target has headroom.
• Scan mode rasterizes each page into an image and compresses that. It reaches much smaller files, and it is the right choice for documents that were scanned or photographed in the first place — they have no text layer to preserve.

The trap is using Scan mode on a document that was born digital. You get a smaller file and lose the ability to search it, select a reference number from it, or have a screen reader read it aloud. Try Keep text first and only fall back to Scan mode if the target demands it.

Other targets: 100 KB · 200 KB · 500 KB · 1 MB · 2 MB · PDF for email

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