What is Gmail's maximum attachment size?

Last reviewed: September 24, 2026 · Markdown version

A personal Gmail account can send 25 MB of attachments per message; above that, Gmail sends a Google Drive link instead of the file. Google's wording is "For personal Gmail accounts, the limit is 25 MB", and when "your total attachment size is greater than the limit, Gmail automatically removes the attachment and adds it as a Google Drive link in the email" (Send attachments with your Gmail message, read 24 September 2026). That is the sending side. Receiving is a separate question, and for personal accounts Google's page does not answer it.

Sending and receiving are two limits

The attachments page gives one number for personal accounts and does not say whether it covers mail coming in as well as mail going out. We did not find a published receiving figure for a personal account on the Gmail Help pages we read today, so we are not going to quote the one that circulates on forums.

Work and school accounts are different: there, "your Google Workspace administrator sets the attachment sending limits and attachment receiving limits". Google's administrator pages publish the ceilings those settings sit under:

Sending, per edition: Business 25 MB, Education 25 MB, and "Up to 50 MB for Enterprise Plus and 25 MB for Enterprise Standard", with the 50 MB "Available only on the web version of Gmail". These are limits on the total size of the message "before encoding" (Gmail sending limits in Google Workspace, read 24 September 2026).
Receiving: "You can receive emails of up to 50 MB (Enterprise Standard) or 70 MB (Enterprise Plus)", and "up to 500 attachments per single email" (Gmail receiving limits in Google Workspace, read 24 September 2026).

The encoding catch, worked through

The receiving figures carry a footnote that changes what they mean: "These values are the limit after encoding, which adds about a 37% increase" (same receiving page). Attachments travel inside an email as text, and text is bigger than the file. Doing the division ourselves, a 50 MB receiving limit holds roughly 36 MB of original file (50 ÷ 1.37), and 70 MB holds roughly 51 MB. Those two results are our arithmetic on Google's 37%, not figures Google publishes.

The practical reading: the number on the page is not the size of the file you can squeeze in, and a file that sits just under a limit on your computer can still be over it once it is inside a message.

What the Drive link actually is

When Gmail swaps a file for a link, the recipient gets access to a Drive file rather than a copy of it. Gmail "checks to see if your recipients have access to the file" and, if they don't, asks you to change its sharing settings before sending. Two consequences follow from Google's own page (Send Google Drive attachments in Gmail, read 24 September 2026):

Choose "Anyone with the link" and anyone the message is later forwarded to gets the same permission as the original recipients.
Keep the file private and some recipients cannot open it at all — for example people who "don't have a Google Account".

The same page also says "Recipients don't need to have a Google Account" in the link-sharing case, and closes with "Only people with a Google Account can see Google Drive files you attach in Gmail". Those two sentences sit uneasily together; the first is specific to link sharing, so that is the one we would plan around, and test with one outside address before relying on it.

The size ceiling on that route is Drive's, not Gmail's: for ordinary files it is "Up to 5 TB" (Files you can store in Google Drive, read 24 September 2026).

Where the big file ends up

A link-sent file lives in Drive. Asked whether files in "Shared with me" use the recipient's space, Google answers "No, but they count against the file owner's storage" (How your Google storage works, read 24 September 2026). Google's attachments page does not say in so many words where the automatically converted file is stored. Our reading is that it is your Drive, which means sending large files by link moves their weight from Gmail to Drive rather than removing it. The shared 15 GB counts both.

If a file will not send at all, the cause is usually not size. Blocked file types, the virus scanner and a full account are covered in why Gmail attachments keep failing.