Files never leave your device.How it works
How to compress a PDF to 200 KB
- 1Drop your PDF above (or click to select).
- 2Click Compress — we search for the highest quality that stays under 200 KB.
- 3Download the result, or see the smallest we could reach if 200 KB isn't possible.
Frequently asked questions
- Why 200 KB?
- Many job portals, visa sites, and email systems cap individual PDFs around 200 KB. This tool aims just under that so your upload goes through.
- Will the text stay readable?
- Yes. Pages with real text keep it selectable — only images are re-encoded. Scanned pages are re-encoded at a lower resolution.
- Do my files get uploaded?
- No — everything runs in your browser. Your PDF never leaves your device.
The 200 KB sweet spot for applications
200 KB is the limit you'll meet most often on job boards, immigration portals, and HR systems that ask for a CV, a certificate, or an ID “under 200 KB.” It's tight enough to keep files lightweight but roomy enough that a typical one- or two-page document survives with its detail intact. HivePDF aims just under the limit so your upload is accepted on the first try.
Getting a clean result at 200 KB
For the sharpest outcome, start from the best source you have — a native PDF export beats a photo of a printout. Scanned certificates and IDs compress well at this size. If your document is mostly text, it will likely land well under 200 KB with room to spare, and its text stays selectable. If a longer scan overshoots, HivePDF reports the smallest it could reach.
When compressing again doesn't help
If a PDF has already been compressed once — by a scanner app, a phone's photo compression, or an earlier pass through this same tool — running it through compression a second time rarely saves much more. Each re-encoding of an already-lossy image throws away more detail for diminishing size gains, so a document that's still over 200 KB after one honest compression pass usually needs a different fix: cropping out unused margins, scanning at a lower resolution to begin with, or splitting a multi-document file into pieces a portal will actually accept separately.
Applying to a whole application at once
Job and visa applications often ask for several documents — CV, ID, certificates — each under its own 200 KB limit. Compress each file individually rather than combining them first; a merged file inherits the combined size of all its parts, and getting a five-page combined document under 200 KB is far harder than getting each two-page document there on its own.