Reduce a PDF to fit IRCC’s upload limit

The limit is not one number

Almost every page about this says 4 MB. IRCC’s own Help Centre says otherwise: the limit depends on which of its six accounts you are signed into.

Two things fall out of that table, and both cost people real time.

The formats are not the same either. The secure account lists .jpg but not .jpeg, and .doc but not .docx. The citizenship application accepts neither Word format at all. The PR Portal does not take .tiff.

So a file that uploaded perfectly for someone else in a different stream can be refused for you — because of one letter in the extension. That is not a bug you can debug by retrying.

Check which account you are in before you trust any number, including the ones on this page. IRCC changes them, and this table was read from their Help Centre on 31 August 2026.

One file per field — but you may combine

IRCC allows a single file per upload field, and explicitly permits merging several PDFs into one to get around it.

That is the answer to the most common version of this problem: three payslips, one field. Merge them into one PDF in the order an officer would read them, then compress the combined file to fit.

Combine first, compress second. Compressing three files separately and then merging gives you a worse result than merging and compressing once.

Where IRCC’s own advice stops short

Their Help Centre suggests saving at “lowest file size”, scanning at 96 DPI or 150 DPI, and removing unnecessary images. All of that works.

But for a scanned document it is a blunt instrument, and it leaves the biggest saving on the table.

Dropping to 96 DPI reduces resolution everywhere — including on the text, which is the one part a visa officer actually has to read. The alternative is to spend your bytes differently: convert the page to high-contrast black and white at a higher resolution, which is what a document scanner or a fax machine does.

Text is black marks on white paper. Storing 256 shades of grey for it is spending the budget on information that is not there.

Measured on a real four-page scanned report:

• The conventional approach needed 111 KB and the text was not readable.
• The black-and-white approach produced 70 KB and the text was readable.

Smaller and clearer, from the same document. IRCC does not mention this, and neither does any of the advice repeating IRCC.

Roughly 35 KB per page keeps a scanned page comfortably readable in black and white. Below about 21 KB per page it becomes a struggle whatever tool you use.

What to actually do

1. Check your account type and use the right limit from the table above.
2. Merge first if several documents belong in one field.
3. Compress to a number, not to a vague quality setting. Target about 3.5 MB

against a 4 MB limit — leave yourself margin, because a file that is exactly at the limit sometimes fails.

1. Open the result before you submit it. Ten seconds. An immigration application is

not the place to find out a scan came back illegible.

1. If it is still too big and it is a scan, rescan in black-and-white at 200 DPI

rather than compressing the colour version harder.

When the honest answer is "rescan"

If you have a twenty-page colour scan and a 4 MB budget, that is 200 KB per page, which is comfortable. If you have eighty pages, it is 50 KB per page, and a colour scan at that size is a smear.

At that point no compressor on the internet will give you a readable result, and the fix is upstream: rescan properly, in black and white, at 200 DPI. A scanner throws away the paper colour and the shadows at source — the things consuming your budget without carrying any information.

It takes longer than clicking a button, which is presumably why nothing else suggests it. On an application that costs thousands of dollars and months of waiting, it is still the right answer.