Job application portals, government forms, and university application systems often set a hard upload cap — commonly 2MB, 5MB, or 10MB — and simply reject anything larger with no way around it.
Upload caps on forms and portals exist to control server storage and processing costs on their end, not because your document is unusually large by normal standards. A scanned resume or transcript can easily exceed a 2MB cap even though it looks like an ordinary file.
Some documents — scanned at very high resolution, or with dozens of photos — may need more aggressive compression to fit a strict cap. In that case, prioritize legibility of the most important pages, since some quality loss is an acceptable trade-off against outright rejection by the portal.
Ready to try it yourself?
Compress your PDF to fit the limit →Try removing any pages that aren't strictly required (using a split/extract tool) before compressing, since fewer pages means less data to begin with.
No — compression re-encodes the images inside a valid PDF structure; the file remains a normal, openable PDF.