A limit worth planning around
Fifteen megabytes is small enough that ordinary practice can run into it. A moderately sized scanned exhibit will exceed it. So will a declaration with a handful of full-resolution photographs attached.
The ceiling applies to each PDF document as uploaded, so components of a filing are measured individually. That is the only thing working in a filer's favor at this figure.
The gap between districts here is stark: a document at 60 MB would be unremarkable in the Western District of Washington and four times over the limit in this one. Federal limits are set district by district, and there is no national figure.
Why a filing gets this large
At 15 MB, imagery dominates almost immediately. Twenty pages of 300 DPI color scanning can reach it. Half a dozen phone photographs certainly will.
Text-native documents are the exception and stay small: a hundred-page brief exported from a word processor is typically under a megabyte, because the file stores letterforms and positions rather than pictures of a page.
That gap is what makes compression effective here. The images inside a PDF can usually be resampled hard without touching the text, so a scanned exhibit gives up most of its size before legibility becomes the constraint.
Checking the limit yourself
CM/ECF reports its own current ceiling. From the CM/ECF startup page, the Court Information link shows the Maximum PDF File Size the system will accept at that moment. That figure is authoritative for the system you are actually filing into, and it is worth a look whenever a filing is refused for size — districts raise these limits without much announcement, and a number you remember from last year may simply be out of date.
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 15 MB really the limit?
- That is the figure this district publishes for each document filed in CM/ECF. The Court Information link inside CM/ECF reports the ceiling the system is enforcing at any given moment.
- Why is this so much lower than other federal courts?
- Each federal district sets its own limit. There is no national CM/ECF standard, and the spread across districts runs from around 10 MB to 100 MB.
- Can a large scanned exhibit realistically reach 15 MB?
- Often, though it is a demanding target. Resampling high-resolution color scans to 150 DPI or below removes the great majority of a file. ShrinkWrit reports the fidelity of the result so you can judge whether what came out is still fit to read.
- What if compression cannot get under the limit?
- The tool says so plainly rather than handing back a file that will be refused, and shows the smallest size it managed. It never returns a file larger than the one you started with.
The 15 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.