What the 100 MB limit covers
The ceiling applies to each PDF document as uploaded, not to a case, a docket entry, or a day's filings taken together. A submission made up of several separately uploaded documents is measured document by document.
Because the figure moved twice in recent years — 35 MB, then 75 MB, then 100 MB — guidance written even a year or two ago may quote a number this district no longer enforces. The court's own notice is the thing to trust.
Why a filing gets this large
At 100 MB, an ordinary brief drafted in a word processor is nowhere near the ceiling; a text-native PDF of fifty pages is typically well under a megabyte. Files that break a limit this high are almost always scans, and usually color scans at high resolution.
A page scanned in 24-bit color at 600 DPI can occupy several megabytes on its own. Multiply that by an exhibit of a few hundred pages and the arithmetic gets to 100 MB quickly. Photographs straight from a phone camera and screen recordings are the other common causes.
The distinction that matters for compression is whether the PDF contains text or pictures of text. Text stays small and compresses poorly because there is little to remove. Scanned images are the opposite: they dominate the file and respond dramatically to resampling.
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size — districts raise these limits without much announcement, and a number you remember from last year may simply be out of date.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 the W.D. Washington limit really 100 MB?
- The court's notice raised it from 75 MB to 100 MB per document effective 6 March 2026. Older pages around the web still quote 35 MB or 75 MB. Check the CM/ECF Court Information link for the figure the system is enforcing right now.
- Does the 100 MB apply to all my exhibits together?
- It is stated as a per-document limit. Each PDF is measured on its own as it is uploaded.
- My PDF is 140 MB of scans. Can compression alone get it under?
- Usually, yes. A 600 DPI color scan resampled to 200 DPI commonly loses 80–90% of its size while remaining legible. ShrinkWrit works down a resolution ladder and stops at the first setting that fits, so it does not degrade the file further than it needs to.
- Will compressing destroy the searchable text?
- Not in the normal path. ShrinkWrit downsamples the images embedded in a PDF and leaves text objects untouched, so text stays selectable and searchable. If a file can only be made to fit by rasterizing the pages, the result panel says so explicitly, because that does discard the text layer.
The 100 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.