Compress PDF to 500KB

The Acrobat online PDF compressor balances an optimised file size against the expected quality of images, fonts and other file content. Just drag and drop a PDF into the PDF compression tool above and let Acrobat reduce the size of your PDF files without compromising quality.

For more refined control of optimisation settings, you can try Adobe Acrobat Pro for free for seven days. Acrobat Pro lets you customise PPI settings for colour, grayscale and monochrome image quality. You can also use PDF editor tools, edit scans with OCR functionality, convert PDFs to Microsoft PowerPoint and other file formats, convert PNGs and other image file formats, organise and rotate PDF pages, split PDFs, optimise PDFs and more. You can use Acrobat on any device, including iPhones and on any operating system, including Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS or Android.

You can typically compress PDFs to 500 KB if the original file is reasonably small—usually under 3–5 MB—and doesn’t contain too many high-resolution images or complex formatting. Text-heavy documents or files with simple layouts are more likely to reach the 500 KB target without noticeable quality loss. While tools like Adobe Acrobat can handle much larger files, the final compressed size depends on the content and structure of the original PDF.

If you want to further compress a PDF file, you need to reduce the colour depth of the images. However, this will affect the quality of the images. You can also remove unnecessary metadata from the PDF file in order to further reduce file size.

Can I compress several PDF files to 500 KB each at the same time?

Yes, Adobe Acrobat supports batch processing, allowing you to compress multiple files in one go. As with other types of compression, the resizing of each file to exactly 500 KB will depend on its original size and content. Text-based PDFs or those with minimal graphics are more likely to reach that target without losing quality. Files with lots of images or complex formatting may not compress as effectively, even when processed together.

How long does it take to compress a PDF to 500 KB?

Compressing a PDF to 500 KB takes anywhere between a few seconds to a minute, depending on the file size or your internet speed.