PDFThis

Upload PDFs to Common App.

The 2 MB limit, the encryption trap, and how to actually upload.

Free tool

Open the tool — drop a photo, get a clean PDF in under 10 seconds.

Make a Common App PDF

The problem

You're trying to upload a tax return, transcript, or SAT score report and Common App keeps rejecting it. The portal caps files at 2000 KB (2 MB). You compress, it rejects as corrupted. You compress less, it rejects as too large. Or your transcript is password-protected from your school's registrar, and Common App can't read encrypted PDFs at all. You're days from a deadline.

The fix

If you're starting from a paper document or a photo, PDFThis builds you a Common-App-friendly PDF from the photo directly — typically under 1 MB without compromising legibility. The output is unencrypted, properly formatted, and small enough to leave plenty of headroom under the 2 MB cap. For PDFs you already have that are over 2 MB, you'll need a PDF compressor (any of the well-known online compressors work). For encrypted school transcripts, you'll need to re-print to PDF to strip the encryption.

What you get

  • Common App caps most uploads at 2000 KB (2 MB) — a strict limit, and counterintuitively, some uploads also fail if the file is too small.
  • PDFs created from phone photos via PDFThis are typically 200 KB - 1.5 MB, well within Common App's window.
  • Encrypted PDFs are silently rejected. PDFThis output is never encrypted — your scanned tax return, signed form, or other photographed document uploads first try.
  • Multi-page documents (like a multi-page tax return) become multi-page PDFs, with each page cropped and clean — exactly what admissions readers want to see.

Questions

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Make a Common App PDF

Last updated: May 2026