Document and transaction, both enforced
Two numbers govern a submission here: 35 MB for any individual document, and 60 MB for the transaction as a whole. A set of documents that are each acceptable can still exceed the transaction ceiling in combination.
The court directs filers with material beyond these limits to their electronic filing service provider, which may offer file transfer arrangements for very large documents. Reducing the file below the ceiling avoids that route entirely.
California has no single statewide figure. Individual Superior Courts set their own, and many use the eFileCA defaults of 25 MB per document within a 35 MB envelope — noticeably tighter than Orange County's. A limit learned in one California court should not be assumed in another.
Why a filing gets this large
At 35 MB per document, scanned exhibits are the usual cause. Roughly seventy pages of 300 DPI color scanning reaches it, and records obtained from third parties often arrive scanned at settings nobody chose deliberately.
Photographs are the other frequent cause and the most compressible. An image straight from a phone camera is many megapixels; embedded in a filing that will be read on a screen, the great majority of that resolution is never seen.
Text-native documents rarely present a problem at all, because a PDF exported from a word processor stores text as text and stays small almost regardless of length.
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
- What are Orange County's e-filing size limits?
- 35 MB for an individual document and 60 MB for a transaction.
- Do all California courts use these numbers?
- No. California courts set their own limits. Many use the eFileCA defaults of 25 MB per document and 35 MB per envelope, which are tighter than Orange County's figures.
- My documents are each under 35 MB but the submission failed.
- Check the combined total against the 60 MB transaction ceiling. Two 32 MB documents are individually acceptable and exceed it together.
- How much can a photograph-heavy filing shrink?
- Usually a great deal. Photographs carry far more resolution than a document page ever displays, so resampling them to page resolution commonly removes most of the file with no visible difference at reading size.
The 35 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.