Plan limits

Claude file upload limits: 500MB and 20 files a chat, 30MB in a project

A chat takes up to 20 files of up to 500MB each, and PDFs up to 1000 pages. Project files are capped at 30MB each, with no count limit as long as everything fits in Claude's context window.

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

Anthropic's help article on uploading files has two different sets of limits, one for chats and one for projects, and they're far apart. A file you can drop into a chat may be too big to add to a project's knowledge.

Chat file size

500MB per file

Files per chat

Up to 20

PDF length

Up to 1000 pages

Image size

Up to 8000x8000 pixels

Project file size

30MB per file

Free plan projects

Five at most

Uploading to a chat

Each file can be up to 500MB, and you can attach up to 20 in one chat. Images can be up to 8000 by 8000 pixels (the same article recommends at least 1000 by 1000 for good results). The article gives no daily upload count. The limit you're more likely to meet is the context window, the amount of text Claude can hold in one conversation, because the text extracted from your files takes up room in it.

Uploading to a project

Project files stop at 30MB each. The number of files is unlimited, but only as long as their total content fits in Claude's context window, and the article warns that extra token limits may apply depending on how much text comes out of them.

Paid plans (Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise) get a way around that. When a project's knowledge gets close to the context limit, Claude switches to RAG, retrieval-augmented generation, which pulls in only the parts of your files that a question needs. Anthropic says that expands capacity by up to 10x. Free accounts don't get it, and they can make five projects at most.

Long PDFs

Claude reads both the text and the visuals (charts, images, graphics) of a PDF that's 100 pages or shorter. From 101 to 1000 pages it reads the text only. Past 1000 pages the upload fails with an "Uploaded file is too large" error, and the article's advice is to split big documents into smaller sections.

Other documents are read as text only, so a picture inside a Word file is invisible to Claude whatever its length.

Which files it takes

Documents: PDF, DOCX, CSV, TXT, HTML, ODT, RTF, EPUB, JSON and XLSX. Spreadsheets in XLSX need code execution and file creation switched on in your settings first. Images: JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP.

For how much you can chat before a cap, see the other plan limits.