Discord doubled the free upload limit from 10 MB to 20 MB in August 2026. Almost nothing on the internet has caught up — including, at the time of writing, several of Discord's own help pages, which still quote the old number.
So here are the current limits, how much video actually fits inside them, and why an upload still fails when the file looks small enough — which, on a phone, is usually not the reason the rest of the internet gives.
Quick takeaways
- Free accounts: 20 MB per file. Raised from 10 MB on 13 August 2026. It was 8 MB for years, 25 MB from 2023, then cut to 10 MB in 2024 — which is why you will find every one of those numbers quoted confidently.
- Nitro Basic: 50 MB. Nitro: 500 MB. The cap follows your account, not the server you are posting in.
- Target 19 MB, not 20. A target-size encode lands within a percent or two, and two percent over a hard ceiling is a failed upload.
- Discord does not re-encode your video. Unlike Instagram or WhatsApp, what you upload is exactly what your friends download — so careful compression is worth more here than almost anywhere else.
- On mobile, the limit is now checked before the app compresses your file — a change shipped in the same August 2026 update. Phones can refuse clips they used to accept, and compressing first is what fixes it.
The current limits
| Plan | Limit per file |
|---|---|
| Free | 20 MB |
| Nitro Basic | 50 MB |
| Nitro | 500 MB |
Three things worth knowing about how this is enforced:
It is per file, not per message. Attaching four files means four separate 20 MB budgets, not one shared between them.
It follows your account, not the server. A Nitro subscriber posting in a completely ordinary free server still gets their 500 MB. Server boost level does not change your upload cap — that is a persistent misconception, and it comes from the days when boosting did raise the server's limit.
Discord does not compress what you upload. It stores and serves your exact bytes. This is genuinely different from most platforms, and it changes the calculation: on Instagram or TikTok your careful export gets re-encoded anyway, so effort is partly wasted. On Discord, the quality you check before uploading is the quality everyone sees.
What 20 MB actually holds
The limit is the easy half of the question. Here is the half that decides whether the video is watchable: at a 19 MB target, this is exactly how much bitrate is left at each length, and the largest resolution that bitrate carries without falling apart.
| Video length | Bitrate left for video | Comfortable at |
|---|---|---|
| 30 seconds | 5,079 kbps | 1080p |
| 1 minute | 2,475 kbps | 720p |
| 2 minutes | 1,174 kbps | 480p |
| 5 minutes | 393 kbps | 360p, and visibly rough |
| 10 minutes | 132 kbps | not realistic |
The bitrate column is arithmetic: 19 MB spread across the duration, minus 128 kbps for stereo audio and about 2% for container overhead. It is a hard ceiling, not an estimate. The resolution column is a judgement, derived from published H.264 bitrate ladders and pulled down about a third because re-encoding already-compressed footage survives lower bitrates than encoding a clean master does.
The practical reading: anything under about two minutes is comfortable. Past five minutes, 20 MB stops being enough for footage anyone wants to watch, and you should either trim it or use a link.
Screen recordings are the exception
If you are posting a clip of a game, a bug, or your screen, you have far more room than the table suggests. We measured this: at an aggressive setting a 1080p screen recording scored VMAF 89.9 at 0.79 MB for ten seconds, while camera footage at the same setting scored 74.4 and was three times larger.
Screen content is mostly flat colour and mostly unchanged between frames, so an encoder can describe it in almost no bits. A moving scene with sensor noise has genuinely new information in every frame.
So a five-minute screen capture can be perfectly watchable inside 20 MB, where five minutes of handheld camera footage will not be. The full measurements are in CRF explained.
How to compress a video for Discord
- Trim first. The dead seconds at the start are bits you never have to spend. Free, and it costs no quality at all.
- Set a target size of 19 MB. Not 20 — see below.
- Drop to 720p if the clip is over a minute. On the phone or window most people will watch it in, 720p at a healthy bitrate looks better than 1080p starved of one.
- Stay on H.264. H.265 is 25–40% smaller on camera footage (and no smaller at all on screen recordings), but plenty of people's devices will refuse to play it — and "it won't open for me" is a worse outcome on Discord than a slightly larger file.
Our Discord compressor arrives with the target already set to 19 MB and the codec already on H.264.
Why an upload fails when the file is under the limit
Two causes, and both are invisible from the Discord UI.
On a phone, the file is measured before your app compresses it
This is the one that catches people, and it is new. The same August 2026 announcement that raised the cap also changed when mobile measures the file:
We're also changing how that limit is checked on mobile, with file size now measured before compression instead of after, matching how desktop already works.
— @discord, 13 August 2026
Before this, the Discord mobile app could shrink your file and then check the result against the cap. Now it checks what came off your camera roll. So a clip that used to squeak through after the app's own compression can be refused outright — which is why a handful of people experienced an update that raised the limit as mobile getting stricter.
Compressing before you upload is the direct fix: the file Discord measures is then the file you chose the size of.
The megabyte is probably not against you
Discord counts in binary units — the old 8 MB cap was exactly 8,388,608 bytes, and the server-side default for the 25 MB era was 26,214,400. Some file managers show MB as 1,000,000 bytes instead. That difference runs in your favour: a file your Mac reports as "20.0 MB" is 20,000,000 bytes, which is 19.07 MiB, comfortably under a 20 MiB line.
So this is not the reason to leave headroom. The reason to leave headroom is that a target-size encode lands within a percent or two of what you asked for, and against a hard ceiling you want those couple of percent pointing downward. That is all the 19 MB preset is doing.
If a file well under 20 MB is refused anyway, note that several of Discord's own help pages still document 10 MB. We have not been able to confirm a client that still enforces it, but if you hit a refusal you cannot explain, 10 MB is the value to fall back to.
Sending something bigger than 500 MB
Even Nitro tops out at 500 MB per file. Above that, the options are:
- Compress harder. A 45-minute recording at 500 MB is carrying about 1,500 kbps, which is fine at 720p. Most long recordings have far more slack than people assume.
- Split the file. Two 20-minute halves beat one 40-minute file that will not send.
- Link it. For anything genuinely large, a link to cloud storage is a better experience than a 500 MB attachment your friends have to download before they can see whether it was worth it.
FAQ
What is the Discord file size limit in 2026?
20 MB on a free account, 50 MB on Nitro Basic, 500 MB on Nitro. The free tier was 10 MB until August 2026 and 25 MB before that, which is why guides disagree. Server boost level does not affect it.
Does boosting a server increase the upload limit?
No, not any more. The cap follows the account of whoever is uploading. This used to work differently, which is why the belief persists.
Does Discord compress uploaded videos?
No. Discord stores and serves the exact file you uploaded. Images are sometimes re-encoded for previews, but the original is preserved and video is untouched.
How long a video fits in 20 MB?
About two minutes at 720p before quality starts to suffer, or 30 seconds at 1080p. Screen recordings do much better — several minutes at 1080p is realistic because screen content compresses far more efficiently than camera footage.
Why does my upload fail even though the file is under 20 MB?
On a phone, usually because mobile now measures the file at its original size, before the app's own compression — a change Discord shipped alongside the higher cap in August 2026. Compress before you upload and that goes away. Our preset is 19 MB rather than 20 to absorb the percent or two of overshoot in a target-size encode.
Can I send a video over 20 MB without Nitro?
Compress it, or post a link. For most clips people want to share on Discord, 20 MB is genuinely enough — it is longer recordings and high-motion footage that need either a stronger setting or a smaller frame.
Compress a video for Discord — the target is already set, no account needed, no watermark. Other limits: email · WhatsApp · Telegram · TikTok