Government portals in India are notorious for strict file size limits — and they almost never tell you why your upload failed. SSC, UPSC, NPS, EPFO, passport seva, and state recruitment boards commonly cap uploaded documents at 50KB, 100KB, or 200KB. A standard scanned resume or certificate that looks fine on your screen can be 500KB to 2MB, which gets silently rejected at the portal.
The most common documents that need compression for government portals are scanned photographs, signature images, educational certificates, caste certificates, and ID proofs. Each portal has different limits for different documents — your photo might need to be under 50KB while your certificate upload allows 200KB.
The key thing to understand: government portal PDFs are almost always scanned documents, which means they are essentially image files packaged as PDFs. The compressor works by reducing the resolution and quality of those embedded images. At 50KB the result will look compressed, but it will be readable — which is all the portal needs.
For the strictest limits, use our dedicated tools: Compress to 50KB for SSC/UPSC photo and signature uploads, Compress to 100KB for most certificate uploads, and Compress to 200KB for larger document submissions.
It varies by portal and document type. Photos and signatures are typically 50KB or less. Certificates and ID proofs range from 100KB to 500KB. Always check the specific portal instructions before uploading — the limit is usually shown next to the upload button.
A few reasons: the portal may have both a file size limit AND a dimension limit for images. Also check that you are uploading a PDF and not a JPG or PNG if the portal specifically requires PDF. Some portals also reject files with certain metadata — try compressing again with a fresh scan.
Yes, but check whether the portal wants each document uploaded separately. If it accepts a single combined file, merge your certificates first using our Merge PDF tool, then compress the result to the required size.