āFor best performance with visual analysis (charts, images), keep PDFs under 100 pages. Text-only PDFs can be larger.Claude Help Center ā
āClaude Projects allow unlimited files (30MB each) in the knowledge base ā only files relevant to your query are loaded into the active context window.Claude Help Center ā
āThe Anthropic API supports up to 32MB per request via the standard Messages API, and up to 500MB via the Files API (beta).Anthropic Docs ā
āAmazon Bedrock (Claude) has a stricter limit of 4.5MB per document, with a maximum of 5 documents per request.AWS Docs ā
āPDFs packed with images consume tokens faster and may cause context overflow even if under 30MB.
ā Frequently Asked Questions
What is the maximum PDF size for Claude.ai?+
30MB per file for the Claude.ai web app and Projects. You can upload up to 20 files per conversation.
Why does Claude say my PDF exceeds the context window even though it's under 30MB?+
Image-heavy PDFs consume far more tokens than text-only PDFs of the same size. A 30MB scanned PDF can exceed Claude's 200,000-token context window. Compressing images or splitting the PDF into smaller parts helps.
How many pages can Claude handle in a PDF?+
For text-only PDFs, Claude can handle large page counts within the 200,000-token context window. For PDFs with charts or images, keeping it under 100 pages is recommended for best performance.
What is the PDF limit for the Anthropic API?+
32MB per request via the standard Messages API. The Files API (beta) supports up to 500MB.
What is the PDF limit for Claude on Amazon Bedrock?+
4.5MB per document, with a maximum of 5 documents per request ā significantly stricter than the Claude.ai web app.
What should I do if my PDF causes a context overflow error in Claude?+
Split the PDF into smaller topic-specific sections, compress image quality to reduce token usage, or convert image pages to text/Markdown format.