Compress a PDF to 500 KB
500 KB is the classic job-portal limit, and the one most CVs fail. What makes a CV big is almost never the words.
Where 500 KB comes from
- Job boards and applicant tracking systems, where 500 KB is a long-standing default for a CV.
- HR portals that accept a PDF but reject anything that looks like a scan of a scan.
- Email systems at organisations that still enforce small attachment limits internally.
What actually fits in 500 KB
Worked out from what this tool produces, not from a rule of thumb. Where a row says no, it says what to do instead.
| What you have | Fits in 500 KB? | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| A two-page CV, text and a photo | Comfortably | Usually the lossless pass alone — text stays selectable |
| A CV exported from a design tool | Yes | One balanced pass; embedded fonts and vector art are the weight, not the words |
| Three to five scanned pages, greyscale | Yes | Around 130–150 dpi |
| Two or three scanned pages in colour | Yes | Around 140 dpi |
| A portfolio with full-page images | Depends | It will fit, but the images will show it. Send a link to the full version alongside |
Work out which kind of PDF you have before anything else: open it and try to select a line of text. If the words highlight, the file was exported from a document and is mostly text — anything over 1 MB then means one oversized image is hiding in it. If nothing highlights, the page is a picture, and that is where nearly every oversized CV comes from.
A CV should reach 500 KB with its text intact. If yours only fits by being turned into images, something in it is oversized — usually a photograph dropped in at camera resolution, or a logo saved as a 2000px PNG.
An applicant tracking system reads the text in your CV. A CV compressed into images has no text to read, which can quietly cost you the match even though the upload succeeded. This is the one case where it is worth going back and fixing the source file.
Three things not to do: do not compress an already-compressed copy, because each pass throws away detail permanently and the second one starts to show; do not screenshot the pages and rebuild the PDF, which gets under the limit by destroying every word a hiring system would have read; and do not scan a CV at 600 dpi, which is four times the size of 300 dpi for something nobody will print.
Questions
- Why is my two-page CV 4 MB?
- Almost always one image. A phone photograph used as a headshot arrives at 3–4 MB and does not get smaller by being placed in a small box on the page — the full-resolution original is still embedded. Replace it with a version a few hundred pixels wide and the file usually drops below 500 KB on its own.
- Will the recruiter see any difference?
- If the lossless pass was enough, there is nothing to see — the file is byte-for-byte the same document, stored more efficiently. If it had to re-encode, text you set in the document stays crisp at these settings; a photograph loses detail you would have to zoom to find.
- Should I keep the text selectable?
- For a CV, yes, and it matters more than it sounds: hiring systems search the text. The tool tries the lossless route first for exactly this reason and only re-encodes when 500 KB cannot be reached any other way.
A different limit?
Every one of these opens the same tool with a different number in the box. If the limit you were given is not here, open Compress PDF and type it in.