Video upload size limits in 2026: Discord, Gmail, and everywhere else

Upload limits change more often than the blog posts about them. Half the articles ranking for “Discord file size limit” in late 2026 still say 25 MB, a number from 2023 that has been wrong twice since. Here is the current map, with dates, so you can tell when this page itself ages.

Discord: 20 MB free, finally

Discord’s free upload cap has been a moving target: 8 MB for years, raised to 25 MB in April 2023, cut back to 10 MB in September 2024, and raised again to 20 MB in August 2026, the current number. Nitro Basic lifts it to 50 MB and full Nitro to 1 GB. Some boosted servers raise the ceiling for their members, but 20 MB is the only number you can count on in every server.

Two details matter. Discord checks size before upload; you cannot sneak a large file in. And while it recompresses images, it never compresses video for you; an oversized clip is simply refused. Hence the eternal query “compress video for Discord”.

Email: the 25 MB that means 18

Gmail allows 25 MB per message, Outlook.com 20 MB, measured on the encoded message, not your file. Attachments travel base64-encoded at a 33% size markup, so the practical ceiling for a video file is about 18 MB on Gmail and 14 MB on Outlook.com, minus a little for the message itself.

Corporate mail is stricter: 10 MB total-message limits remain common on Exchange setups. If a video absolutely must land in a work inbox, 10 MB is the cautious target. Over the limit, Gmail silently converts your attachment to a Drive link, with permissions, expiry, and friction the recipient will notice.

The quiet 10 and 25 MB caps everywhere else

Beyond the famous platforms lies a vast mid-internet of upload forms with small, hard caps: helpdesk tickets, CMS media libraries, job portals, LMS assignment boxes, bug trackers. 10 MB and 25 MB are the recurring numbers, with 8 MB surviving in older webhooks and forum software: Discord’s original limit outliving its origin.

These forms rarely explain themselves; they just reject the file. The playbook is always the same: find the number, compress to just under it, done. That is literally all SqueezeVid does: pick the number, and it handles the just-under part, locally, with a verified result.

A note on checking these numbers

Every figure above is current as of October 2026 and phrased with its date on purpose. When you read this later, Discord may have moved again; their support article “File Attachments FAQ” is the authoritative source, and this site’s presets get updated when the platforms move.