Your PDF is too big for CM/ECF. Here is your court's actual limit.

The exhibits are scanned, the deadline is today, and CM/ECF will not accept the file. Nothing on the screen tells you what size would have worked, and the figure a colleague gave you from a case in another state turns out to be wrong.

That is the part almost nobody explains. There is no federal limit. There is only your court’s limit, and the spread between courts is enormous.

PACER says the number is local

PACER’s own help page puts it in one sentence: each court sets a limit on the size of PDF files submitted for electronic filing. It then sends filers to the Court CM/ECF Lookup rather than quoting a figure, because there is no figure to quote.

So the practical question is never “what is the CM/ECF limit”. It is “what has my court published, and when did it last change”.

What individual courts publish

Every row below was taken from the court’s own site on 16 August 2026. Limits are per PDF document unless stated otherwise.

Court	Published maximum	Where the court states it
D. Mass.	7 MB	CM/ECF FAQ
S.D.N.Y.	10 MB	ECF Rules and Instructions, 1 July 2024
N.D. Iowa	15 MB	CM/ECF FAQ
N.D. Ga.	30 MB	PDF files and scanning tips
10th Cir.	30 MB per file, 150 MB per transaction	CM/ECF manual, 10th ed., March 2026
C.D. Cal.	35 MB	Notice, effective 2 August 2019
D. Del.	35 MB	Notice, effective 5 December 2016
E.D. Wis.	35 MB	Notice, effective 11 April 2017
N.D. Cal.	50 MB	Preparing my filing
S.D. Fla.	50 MB	CM/ECF FAQ
W.D. Wash.	100 MB	CM/ECF FAQ
Ct. Fed. Cl.	200 MB	CM/ECF FAQ

Two things stand out. The District of Massachusetts allows 7 MB while the Court of Federal Claims allows 200 MB, a difference of nearly thirty times for the same kind of document. And several of these figures date from notices issued years apart, which is why a limit can be raised without any wide announcement. Verify the current limit on your court’s site before you rely on a row here.

This list is not exhaustive. It covers courts whose limits are stated publicly and could be read directly from a uscourts.gov page. If your court is missing, the lookup on PACER is the route to it.

The failure is often silent

The Southern District of New York documents the behaviour that catches people out: if the filing is too large, the system will not allow it, and you will not see a Notice of Electronic Filing. Filers who close the tab assuming success can believe a document is on the docket when nothing was accepted.

Treat the Notice of Electronic Filing as the only evidence that anything happened. No notice means no filing, whatever the previous screen appeared to do.

Why the file is large in the first place

Almost always, scanning. A scanned page is a photograph of a page, so a 60-page exhibit set is 60 photographs, and colour at high resolution multiplies that. Text produced from a word processor is stored as characters and takes a fraction of the space.

That is why courts push filers toward converting directly rather than printing and scanning. The Tenth Circuit requires pleadings in native PDF and explains that native files are text searchable and generally small, which is the reason for the requirement. The Northern District of Georgia and the Western District of Washington both publish scanning guidance aimed at the same problem, including black and white capture at 300 dpi where colour is not essential.

If a document has to be scanned, scanning it correctly the first time solves the size problem before it exists.

Splitting versus compressing

Splitting is usually the right answer for exhibits. Courts expect it and tell you how. The Tenth Circuit directs filers to divide oversized attachments into separate PDFs and label them, and the Western District of Washington asks for sequential labels such as Exhibit 1 Part 1 and Exhibit 1 Part 2. Splitting also preserves the text layer, so the document stays searchable for the clerk and the chambers staff.

Compressing is the right answer when the document cannot sensibly be divided, such as a single brief that is slightly over. Our compress PDF and split PDF tools both run entirely inside your browser, which matters for filings containing sealed material, client identifiers or medical records, because nothing is uploaded to a third party in the process.

One caution about compression. Aggressive image downsampling can make a scanned exhibit hard to read, and an illegible exhibit is a worse outcome than a large one. Check the output at full zoom before you file it.

Size is not the only formatting rule

Courts commonly layer other requirements on top of the size limit. Text searchability is required in some districts. Native PDF rather than scanned PDF is required for pleadings in others. Individual PDFs may be limited to one document each. Judges’ standing orders can add more.

A filing that meets the size limit and breaks one of those rules still gets kicked back, so read the local ECF rules alongside the number.

We are not lawyers

FileGizmo builds file tools. We are not a law firm, nothing here is legal advice, and none of it substitutes for your court’s local rules, the presiding judge’s standing orders, or advice from counsel. What this page does is collect published figures with links to their sources so you can check them yourself.

The quick version

There is no national limit. Find your court’s published figure, confirm it is current, and remember the Notice of Electronic Filing is the only proof your document was accepted. Split exhibits along the lines the court describes, compress only what cannot be split, and scan properly so the problem does not recur.