Updating Aadhaar details — address, date of birth, a name correction — now runs through UIDAI’s own Self-Service Update Portal (myaadhaar.uidai.gov.in), where you upload scanned proof of the change alongside your request. The portal accepts PDF or JPEG up to 2MB per document — a much looser cap than PAN correction’s 300KB or most exam portals’ 200-500KB, but it’s not unlimited, and a scanned bank statement or a multi-page rent agreement can still land well over it.

Short version: if your proof document is over 2MB, open Compress PDF, type 2048 (or a touch under, like 1900) into the custom target field — it takes a number in KB, not MB — and let it compress to that size directly rather than guessing at a quality percentage.

What the Self-Service Update Portal actually requires

UIDAI’s Self-Service Update Portal specifies document uploads in PDF or JPEG format, up to 2MB per file. That applies to proof of address, proof of date of birth, or whatever supporting document your update request needs — check the current document list on the portal itself before you upload, since UIDAI updates it periodically.

Two things make this limit different from the PAN and exam-portal caps covered elsewhere on this site. First, 2MB is a lot of room for a single scanned page — a one-page proof at normal scan settings rarely approaches it. Second, the failures come from multi-page documents and camera photos, not routine scans: a 3-4 page rent agreement, a bank statement spanning several months, or a phone photo at default resolution (often 8-12MB) are what actually exceed it.

Why Aadhaar document uploads get rejected

The proof document has several pages combined into one PDF. A rent agreement or affidavit with multiple signed pages, each scanned at a decent resolution, adds up fast — four pages at 600KB each is already over budget.

It’s a phone photo, not a scan. A utility bill photographed in dim light at full camera resolution, uncropped, is routinely 5-10MB on a modern phone — five times the limit in one file.

The file was saved back out of an editor. Opening a document to annotate or sign it digitally, then exporting again, can re-embed images at a higher resolution than the original.

Unnecessary resolution and color for a document that doesn’t need either. A 300 DPI color scan of a black-and-white utility bill carries far more data than the document needs to stay legible.

Compressing your e-Aadhaar itself is a different problem

Some people land here not because a proof document is too big, but because they’re trying to shrink their own Aadhaar card — the e-Aadhaar PDF downloaded from UIDAI — for a bank KYC form, an EPFO withdrawal claim, or some other portal that has nothing to do with the Self-Service Update Portal. Compress PDF will fail on that file with a generic error, and the reason has nothing to do with size: e-Aadhaar ships password-protected by default, and the tool can’t render pages of a file it can’t open.

UIDAI’s own answer for what that password is: the first four letters of your name as printed on the Aadhaar, in capitals, followed by your four-digit year of birth — SURE1990 for a Suresh Kumar born in 1990, or your full name plus the year if it’s shorter than four letters. Run the file through Remove a Password from a PDF with that password first, then feed the unlocked copy into Compress PDF. The actual proof documents this article is about — a scanned rent agreement, a bank statement, a utility bill — are essentially never encrypted this way, so this only comes up if the file you’re compressing is the Aadhaar card itself.

How to hit the 2MB target

  1. Check the actual file size first. A document already under 2MB needs nothing done to it — don’t compress a perfectly fine file on the assumption that smaller is always better.
  2. If there’s a wide white margin or a dark border from the scanner bed, crop it off first. Crop PDF trims that dead space before you compress — it’s real pixels on every rasterized page, and removing it gives the compressor less area to spend the byte budget on.
  3. Open Compress PDF and upload it.
  4. Use the custom target field and enter 2048 (that field takes KB, not MB), or slightly under (1800-1900) for margin. The tool renders each page and re-encodes it as a JPEG at a quality level it searches for, stepping resolution down only if quality alone can’t get there. That re-encoding happens on every page, including one with a real text layer — a utility e-bill you downloaded as a PDF, say, rather than a scan — so any selectable text in the original becomes part of the image and stops being selectable in the compressed copy. The portal doesn’t care, since it’s checking a visual document either way, but it’s worth knowing if you wanted to keep a searchable copy for yourself.
  5. For a multi-page proof, check whether the portal needs every page. A rent agreement’s signature page and the page naming the address are often what’s checked — uploading just the relevant pages, if the field allows it, is lighter than compressing the whole document hard enough to fit.
  6. Zoom into the result before submitting. At a 2MB budget, compression rarely needs to be aggressive — a target closer to 2MB, rather than 1MB “to be safe,” preserves more detail for no real cost.

The privacy angle, specifically

An Aadhaar update document usually carries your Aadhaar number, full name, address, and the proof document itself — a bank statement, a rent agreement, a utility bill. That’s a meaningfully sensitive bundle of personal data to hand to a random web tool that processes files on a server somewhere you can’t see.

Compress PDF does the rendering and JPEG re-encoding inside your browser tab, using plain JavaScript already loaded in the page — nothing about the file is sent out for processing. Can You Compress a PDF Without Uploading It Anywhere? walks through how that works under the hood: the page is rendered to a canvas, re-encoded locally, and reassembled into a new PDF, using code already shipped in the site’s JavaScript bundle rather than fetched at the moment you use it. Confirm it yourself — open the Network tab, clear it, run the compression, and watch for an outbound request the size of your file. There isn’t one. For a document this specific to your identity, that’s worth checking rather than taking on trust.

If a document won’t compress under 2MB

This is rare at a 2MB target, but it happens with long multi-page proofs — a ten-plus page document scanned at high resolution, where each page needs to stay sharp enough to read a signature or seal. Squeezing that much content that tight pushes quality down fast, since the budget is shared across every page.

If you hit that wall, the fix usually isn’t a harder compression pass — it’s uploading fewer pages (just the ones the portal requires), or rescanning at a lower resolution to begin with. Why Won’t My PDF Compress Any Smaller? covers the actual floor compression runs into. Rejected without a clear reason? PDF Upload Rejected for Wrong File Size covers the other common causes worth ruling out first.

Correcting PAN details around the same time? Compress a PDF to 300KB for PAN Card Correction covers that portal’s considerably tighter limit.

Check your document’s real size, compress to 2MB (or a little under) in Compress PDF if it needs it, and confirm the current accepted-document list on UIDAI’s Self-Service Update Portal before you submit.