Plan limits

ChatGPT file upload limits: 80 files every 3 hours, 512MB a file

Paid plans can upload up to 80 files every three hours and Free accounts three a day. Each file can be up to 512MB, text documents stop at 2 million tokens, and images at 20MB.

Checked against the lab's own pages on October 2, 2026. Limits change often, so the date matters.

These numbers come from OpenAI's File Uploads FAQ. Besides a size cap on each file, ChatGPT limits how many you upload: up to 80 files every three hours. Free accounts get three uploads a day. OpenAI adds that it may lower both during peak hours, so the numbers below are a ceiling.

Upload rate

80 files every 3 hours

Free plan

3 file uploads per day

Any file

512MB hard limit

Text and documents

2M tokens per file

Spreadsheets and CSVs

About 50MB

Images

20MB per image

Size limits for each kind of file

Every file has a hard ceiling of 512MB, in a chat or in a custom GPT. Text and document files usually hit a second wall before that one: they're capped at 2 million tokens each (a token is the unit a model counts text in, often a piece of a word). Spreadsheets don't have the token cap, but a CSV or spreadsheet can't go much past 50MB, and the FAQ says the exact figure depends on how big each row is. Images stop at 20MB.

Why "upload limit reached" can show up after a few uploads

There are two separate limits. One is the rolling rate above. The other is storage: 25GB per user and 100GB per organization, shared across your chats, Projects and the knowledge files in any custom GPTs you've built. Fill the storage and you're blocked however slowly you upload.

OpenAI's own troubleshooting note adds that failed upload attempts can sometimes count toward the rate cap, which fits the complaint of hitting the message after uploading almost nothing. It suggests checking you're signed into the right account and plan, and checking status.openai.com for an incident.

You can see storage under Settings, then Storage. You can't see the three-hour quota at all (the FAQ says ChatGPT doesn't show how much of it you've used or have left), so the first sign is the error. Deleting files from old chats or from GPTs you made frees storage, since they share the cap.

Files per project and per custom GPT

Projects have their own cap by plan: 5 files on Free, 25 on Go and Plus, and 40 on Edu, Pro, Business and Enterprise. A custom GPT can hold 10 files for its whole lifetime.

Pictures inside a PDF

Only Enterprise reads the images in a PDF, through a feature OpenAI calls Visual Retrieval. Every other plan pulls out the digital text and discards the images. That matters for scanned documents: if each page is a photo of text, there's no digital text for ChatGPT to pull out.

If you're seeing a different cap, the one on messages, it's covered with the other plan limits.