Not the Wisconsin state courts
This page covers the federal district court. Wisconsin's state circuit courts run an entirely separate electronic filing system, with a 50 MB ceiling and its own rules about splitting oversized documents. The two are frequently confused because they sit in the same state and both accept PDFs.
Within CM/ECF, the 75 MB figure applies to each PDF document as uploaded rather than to a filing as a whole.
Why a filing gets this large
Seventy-five megabytes is a high ceiling. Text documents do not approach it — a long brief exported from a word processor is usually under a megabyte, because it stores type rather than pictures of type.
Filings that pass 75 MB are scans, photographs, or video-derived material. High-resolution color scanning is the most common single cause: at 600 DPI in 24-bit color, a page can occupy several megabytes on its own, and a few hundred pages compound quickly.
Because the excess is almost entirely image data, resampling is disproportionately effective. Dropping embedded images to a resolution matched to how the document is actually read typically removes most of the file while the text on the page stays clearly legible.
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size — districts raise these limits without much announcement, and a number you remember from last year may simply be out of date.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 E.D. Wisconsin limit 35 MB?
- It was 35 MB after an April 2017 increase from 10 MB, and has since risen to 75 MB. Older checklists and third-party pages often still quote the earlier figures.
- Is this the same as the Wisconsin circuit court limit?
- No. The state circuit courts use a different system with a 50 MB ceiling. This page covers the federal district court's CM/ECF system.
- What is the fastest way to shrink a scanned PDF?
- Reduce the resolution and color depth of the images inside it. Compression tools do this by resampling; doing it at the scanner, if you still can, avoids the loss entirely — greyscale at 300 DPI is dramatically smaller than color at 600 DPI for the same page.
- Does compressing a PDF remove its searchable text?
- Not when the images are resampled, which is the normal path — text objects are left untouched and stay selectable. Rasterizing the pages does remove the text layer, and ShrinkWrit states clearly in the result when it has had to do that.
The 75 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.