File uploads

A File Upload field lets a respondent attach a document to their answers. It sits in the palette’s Advanced group. This page covers what respondents can send, and what happens to the file afterwards.

What a respondent can upload

Limit	Value
File types	pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, gif, webp, heic, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, csv, txt
Size	Between 1 byte and 4 MB per file

Anything outside those is refused as the respondent chooses it, with This file type is not accepted or Files must be between 1 byte and 4MB.

When the file reaches your records

A file takes two steps, the same as the answers around it:

1. On submit, the file is attached to the staged response, so you can open it in the responses console while you review, before anything is written.
2. At processing, the file is linked to the record the submission creates or updates.

That order is deliberate: an uploaded file stays private to the response until an internal step attaches it. If a file is missing from a record, check that the submission has actually been processed. See Processing responses onto records.

A file uploaded to a question that a visibility rule hid is never linked to the record, even though the upload itself succeeded, because an answer the respondent could not see never reaches your data.

The daily upload budget

Files and signatures sent through Sliick Edge, or through another integration using the REST route, count against a budget: each form accepts up to 250 MB in any 24 hours from each integration. It protects your org’s file storage.

• Once a form’s budget is spent, respondents see This form cannot accept more uploads right now. Please try again later. when they add a file or sign, until older uploads leave the 24-hour window. The REST response is 429 with a Retry-After header.
• A single file bigger than the whole budget gets This file is larger than this form accepts in a day.
• It applies to every respondent of that form. A form with a required file or signature cannot be submitted while its budget is spent.
• Change it on the Admin Dashboard’s File uploads panel. Enter a whole number of megabytes, or leave it blank for 250. It applies to every form, counted per form. It is not a form setting.
• Uploads on an Experience Cloud site, or inside Salesforce, are never counted. The count is per uploading user, and a guest’s uploads are owned by the site’s guest record default owner. If that same user also uploads over REST, the guest uploads count toward its REST budget.

Uploads a respondent starts but never submits stay in your org until scheduled clean-up removes them.

Things worth knowing

• A closed form refuses uploads. A form that is not accepting responses, or that has reached its response cap, will not take files either, so a respondent cannot leave files behind for a submission that will not be accepted.
• Save-and-continue keeps them. A respondent who saves and comes back finds files they had already uploaded still attached. See Save-and-continue.
• The message “This form does not accept file uploads” means the form has no File Upload field, or the link points at a different form than you think.
• A mapped File Upload raises a publish warning. It does not block publishing: it is there because file fields behave differently from ordinary answers.
• The palette tints this field green, along with Signature, Payment, GPS Location and Barcode, because it needs the full form to run. See Field types.