Common File Size Limits for Job Applications, Email Attachments, and Government Portals

Most upload limits fall into a small number of familiar ranges: email attachments cap at 20–25MB, job application portals typically allow 2–5MB per document, and government and examination portals often impose both a floor and a ceiling, commonly between 20KB and 200KB for photographs and signatures.

Email attachments

Gmail and Outlook both cap attachments at around 25MB, and because attachments are encoded for transport the practical ceiling is nearer 20MB. Neither imposes a minimum. The complication is the recipient: corporate mail gateways frequently enforce a stricter limit than the sender’s provider, so a message that leaves your outbox can still bounce.

Job application portals

Applicant tracking systems — Workday, Greenhouse, Taleo and the rest — generally allow 2MB to 5MB per document and accept PDF and DOCX. Minimums are rare here. The more common failure is a scanned CV that arrives as a 12MB image-only PDF, which is both too large and unsearchable by the system’s parser.

Government and examination portals

This is where minimums appear, and where most people meet this problem for the first time. Photograph and signature uploads for visa applications, national ID services and competitive examinations routinely specify a band: a photo between 20KB and 50KB, a signature between 10KB and 20KB, a document between 100KB and 200KB. Both ends are enforced, and the error messages are rarely specific about which end you failed.

Dimensions are often specified alongside, in pixels or millimetres. Meeting the byte requirement does not exempt you from the pixel requirement, and the two are independent of each other.

When your file is under the minimum

Rescanning at a higher DPI is the thorough fix and gives you a genuinely more detailed file. When the scan is already good and only the number is wrong, padding it to the exact figure the portal wants is faster and provably does not alter the image. The homepage tool takes an exact target in KB or MB and produces that size on the first attempt.