Two limits, and other Massachusetts courts differ
Two ceilings apply: 25 MB for any single document, and 50 MB for an envelope — everything submitted in one transaction. Both have to be satisfied, and a set of individually acceptable documents can still exceed the envelope together.
The figures are not uniform across Massachusetts. Other courts in the Commonwealth publish different numbers for documents and envelopes, so a limit learned in one court should not be carried into another. Rule 10 of the Massachusetts Rules of Electronic Filing is the governing provision on file size; the specific figures come from each court's own order or guidance.
Why a filing gets this large
At 25 MB per document, scanned material is the usual cause. Roughly fifty pages captured at 300 DPI in color will reach the ceiling, and medical records or business records assembled from multiple sources tend to arrive already scanned at whatever settings the original source used.
Documents produced natively as PDFs are far smaller. A word processor export stores the text as text, and length has remarkably little effect on file size.
Compression works on the difference. Resampling the images embedded in a scanned PDF removes most of its bulk; the text in a text-native document is already efficiently stored and there is little left to reclaim.
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 the Superior Court e-filing size limits?
- 25 MB for a single document and 50 MB for a single envelope, under Standing Order 1-23.
- Do the same limits apply in other Massachusetts courts?
- No. Other courts in the Commonwealth publish their own figures. Rule 10 of the Massachusetts Rules of Electronic Filing governs file size generally, but the numbers differ by court.
- What is an envelope?
- Everything submitted in a single transaction, taken together. The envelope limit applies to that combined total, separately from the per-document limit.
- Can I compress a document without losing the searchable text?
- Yes, if the document contains genuine text. ShrinkWrit resamples embedded images and leaves text objects untouched. A purely scanned document has no text layer to preserve unless it has been through OCR, and rasterizing would discard that layer — the result panel says when that has happened.
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.