Defaults, not a statewide standard
eFileCA runs on Tyler Technologies' Odyssey platform, and 25 MB per document within a 35 MB envelope are that platform's common defaults — the same pair that appears in Georgia, Texas and several other states.
California has no single statewide figure. Orange County Superior Court, for instance, accepts 35 MB documents within a 60 MB transaction; San Bernardino uses 25 MB within 50 MB. Confirm the figures for the specific court rather than relying on the default.
Where two limits apply, both are enforced. Documents that each satisfy the per-document ceiling can still exceed the envelope in combination — three 15 MB documents total 45 MB against a 35 MB envelope.
Why a filing gets this large
Twenty-five megabytes is tight once scans are involved. Roughly fifty pages at 300 DPI in color will reach it, and a handful of phone photographs can on their own.
Documents produced natively as PDFs behave entirely differently, storing text rather than images of text and staying small almost regardless of length. The practical consequence is that two filings of identical page count can differ in size by a factor of a hundred.
Compression exploits that gap: the images inside a PDF can be resampled substantially while any genuine text in the document is left exactly as it was.
If the file is an exhibit
Lossy compression alters a file. Every byte of the output differs from the input, even where the page looks identical on screen, and that can matter if the document's authenticity is ever contested. ShrinkWrit shows the SHA-256 hash of the file you started with and the file it produced, so the change is documented rather than invisible.
The lossless mode strips metadata and repacks the file without touching a single pixel or sample. It saves less, and on a heavily scanned document it may not reach the limit at all — but when it does, the image data is bit-for-bit what it was. Your original is never modified either way; the output is always a new file.
Common questions
- Is 25 MB the limit for all California courts?
- No. It is a common eFileCA default. Individual California courts set their own limits and several are higher.
- What is an envelope?
- Everything submitted in one transaction, measured together. The envelope limit applies to that combined total in addition to the per-document limit.
- Why do Georgia and Texas have the same numbers?
- They run on the same Tyler Odyssey platform and share its defaults. The figures are configured per implementation, so they can and do diverge.
- Is anything sent to a server when I compress?
- No. Compression runs in your browser via WebAssembly. There is no backend, no account, and no upload — which is the point when a filing contains sealed or sensitive material.
The 25 MB figure on this page was last checked against the court’s own notice on Jul 2026. Limits change without much announcement — confirm it at the source before you file.