Compress a PDF to under 1MB
Aimed at the strict 1MB upload caps common on government and application portals.
How to compress a PDF to under 1MB
A 1MB cap is one of the tightest limits you'll run into, and it shows up constantly on government portals — exam registration forms, scholarship applications, recruitment sites, and scanned-document upload fields for certificates or ID proof. These portals are usually built to handle high volumes of applicants, so they cap individual uploads aggressively to keep their servers from being overwhelmed, which is why 1MB (not 5MB or 10MB) is such a common specific number.
Getting under 1MB reliably depends more on your quality setting than anything else. For a single scanned page, a quality setting in the 30-45% range on the slider above will usually land you under 1MB while staying legible for a reviewer. For a multi-page document (say, 5-10 pages of a scanned certificate or transcript), you'll likely need to go lower, toward 20-30%, since the target file size has to cover every page combined. If you're still over 1MB even at the lowest quality setting, the honest answer is that the page count itself is the problem — consider whether the portal actually needs every page, or split the document with Split PDF first and upload only the pages that are required.