Notion's 5MB upload limit

Notion's free plan rejects any file over 5MB. Not 5MB per page, not 5MB per month — 5MB per file, on every upload.

It is one of the lowest hard limits on any mainstream tool, and it bites constantly, because 5MB is less than one phone photo and far less than one screen recording. The current figure and its source are here.

What the paid plans allow, and why the answer is muddled

Worth being honest about: Notion's own help page gives inconsistent numbers.

The body of the article states that on a paid plan, PDFs must be under 20MB and images must be under 5MB. The FAQ on the same page states that paid plans can upload files of up to 5GB each.

Both are on the same page, and they do not agree. The most likely explanation is that the 20MB/5MB figures describe specific embed blocks — the PDF preview and image blocks that render inline — while 5GB is the general file upload ceiling. But that is an inference, not something the documentation says, so treat the lower numbers as the ones that might apply to you and test rather than assume.

The free plan's 5MB, by contrast, is stated unambiguously and is the one most people are hitting.

What is actually over 5MB

Almost everything people want to put in a Notion page:

File	Typical size	Over 5MB?
Phone photo, 48MP	3–8MB	Often
Full-screen 5K screenshot	3–8MB	Often
A scanned 10-page document	15–60MB	Always
A 30-second screen recording	20–80MB	Always
A PDF with photographs	5–40MB	Usually
A text-only PDF, 40 pages	200KB–1MB	No
A cropped screenshot	100–400KB	No

The last two rows are the point: the limit is only painful because files are routinely much larger than their content requires.

Fixing it, by file type

Screenshots — the easiest win

A 5K full-screen capture is a 14.7-megapixel lossless PNG. Cropping it to the part you are actually showing, and halving the dimensions if it is a retina capture, routinely takes 4MB to 300KB with no visible change at all, because both operations are lossless in practice.

If you are hitting Notion's limit with screenshots, you are almost certainly not cropping. The full sequence is here.

PDFs — check whether you can keep the text

If text selects in the document, a structural rewrite often takes 30–70% off losslessly, and plenty of documents reach 5MB that way with nothing lost. If it is a scan, converting to greyscale and reducing resolution is where the file is. Diagnosing which in five seconds.

Keeping the text selectable matters more in Notion than in most places, because Notion's search indexes PDF text. A rasterised PDF becomes invisible to the search of the workspace you put it in — which defeats most of the reason for filing it there.

Photos

Resize to 2000 pixels on the long edge and encode at quality 0.82. A 6MB phone photo lands around 400KB and will look identical in a Notion page that displays it 700 pixels wide.

Screen recordings — do not fight this one

A 30-second screen recording compressed to 5MB is 1.3 Mbps, which is workable at 720p and poor at 1080p. For anything longer than about a minute, 5MB is not a realistic target for video.

The better answer is to host the video elsewhere and embed it. Notion embeds YouTube, Vimeo and Loom natively, and an embed costs you nothing against the file limit. For an internal demo, Loom or a private YouTube upload is the normal pattern.

The upgrade question

Notion's paid plans start low enough that if you are compressing files weekly to fit a workspace you use every day, the subscription is probably cheaper than your time.

But two reasons not to assume it solves the problem. The documentation's inconsistency above means the inline PDF and image blocks may still cap at 20MB and 5MB on paid plans. And a workspace full of 50MB files is slow to load regardless of whether the upload succeeded — compressing a scan from 40MB to 2MB makes the page usable, not just permitted.

Hitting 5MB exactly

5MB is 5,000,000 bytes on the decimal reading, which is the one to aim at — if Notion is counting in 1024-based units, you have 4.9% of slack, and if it is not, you are still under.

Lossless rewrite only         8.2MB   over 5MB
scale 2.0 (144dpi) q0.78      9.6MB   over
scale 1.4 (101dpi) q0.78      5.3MB   over
scale 1.25 (90dpi) q0.78      4.4MB   under, best so far
scale 1.32 (95dpi) q0.78      4.8MB   under, and the best found

Compress a PDF to 5MB, to 2MB or to 1MB measures the real output at each step and ships the best result that genuinely came in under. It runs in your browser, so the contracts, statements and internal documents going into your workspace are not uploaded to a third party on the way there.

FAQ

What is Notion's file upload limit?

5MB per file on the free plan, which is stated unambiguously in Notion's documentation. For paid plans the same help page gives conflicting figures — 5GB per file in its FAQ, but 20MB for PDFs and 5MB for images in its body — so the safest approach on a paid plan is to test rather than assume.

How do I upload a file larger than 5MB to Notion?

Compress it, or host it elsewhere and embed. For screenshots, cropping and halving the dimensions usually gets you under 5MB losslessly. For PDFs, a structural rewrite often saves 30–70% with the text intact. For video, 5MB is not a realistic target past about a minute, so embed from YouTube, Vimeo or Loom instead — embeds do not count against the file limit.

Does upgrading Notion remove the file size limit?

It raises it substantially, but the documentation is inconsistent about by how much, and the inline PDF and image blocks may retain lower caps. It also does not help with page load speed: a workspace full of 40MB scans is slow whether or not the uploads were permitted, so compressing large documents is worth doing either way.

Will compressing a PDF break Notion's search?

Only if the compression rasterises it. Notion indexes the text inside PDFs, so a document whose pages have been turned into images becomes unsearchable in your workspace. Use a tool that attempts a lossless structural rewrite first and only rasterises when the target cannot be met any other way.