How many pages are in a gigabyte? 15,000 to 680,000
A gigabyte holds between roughly 15,000 and 680,000 pages depending on what the files are: scanned images near 15,500 pages per GB, email near 100,000, plain text near 678,000. Document counts run from about 1,200 to 10,000 per GB. That spread is why per-GB pricing is a poor proxy for review effort.
Updated October 6, 2026
How many pages are in a gigabyte?
A gigabyte is a measure of storage, not of content. A page of plain text is about 2 kilobytes; a page scanned at 300 DPI as an image is 50 to 100 kilobytes. That fortyfold difference in bytes per page is why the same gigabyte can hold 678,000 pages of text or 15,500 pages of scans.
| File type | Approx. pages per GB | Approx. documents per GB |
|---|---|---|
| Plain text | 678,000 | n/a |
| Email and attachments | 100,000 | 10,000 |
| Microsoft Word | 65,000 | 5,000 |
| PowerPoint | 17,500 | 2,500 |
| Images and scans | 15,500 | 1,200 |
| Mixed collection (typical) | ~70,000 | ~7,000 |
Sources: the document-per-GB figures come from published analysis of roughly 2,000 hosted matters covering more than 150 million documents, which produced the commonly cited rule of thumb of about 10,000 emails and 5,000 loose files per gigabyte. Page-per-GB figures are industry conversion tables used by service providers and courts. All are averages; a specific collection can vary by a factor of two in either direction.
How many documents are in 1 GB?
Documents are what get reviewed, so this is often the more useful number. Email dominates most corporate collections, around 80 percent of documents, and email is small, so a gigabyte of it holds about 10,000 messages. Attachments are larger and fewer: a gigabyte of loose Office files holds about 5,000.
A mixed collection of 60 percent email, 25 percent Office documents, 5 percent presentations and 10 percent scans works out near 7,000 documents and 70,000 pages per GB. Run your own mix through the volume translator.
How many pages is 300 gigabytes?
A worked example at three profiles:
| Profile | Pages | Documents | Reviewer-hours at 55 docs/hr, 65% culled |
|---|---|---|---|
| All scanned images | 4.65 million | 360,000 | 2,290 |
| Typical mixed | 21 million | 2.1 million | 13,360 |
| All email | 30 million | 3 million | 19,090 |
The per-gigabyte hosting invoice for all three is identical. The review bill differs by a factor of eight.
Why does this matter to what you pay?
Most eDiscovery pricing is metered per gigabyte: processing once, hosting every month. The cost per GB guide works that arithmetic through over a matter’s life, and the cost guide lists every fee it sits alongside. That meter measures storage. The work (and the far larger cost, review) tracks documents. Two matters of the same size in gigabytes can differ tenfold in what a human has to read.
It cuts both ways. Image-heavy collections are expensive per unit of review under per-GB pricing, because every gigabyte generates little to read. Text-heavy collections look cheap on the hosting line while the review bill quietly becomes the real number. Either way, the gigabyte count tells you almost nothing about the matter’s cost until you know what is in it.
Review is where the money goes. RAND’s Where the Money Goes study of eDiscovery costs found review accounted for about 73 percent of total production cost, against 19 percent for processing and 8 percent for collection. Culling (deduplication, de-NISTing, date filters, search terms, email threading) routinely removes the majority of a collection before a reviewer sees it, which is why it matters more than any rate on a price sheet.
How this works on a flat rate
Kavarn, operated by Konvergence Inc, does not bill hosting by the gigabyte, which sidesteps the ambiguity this guide is about. Storage and compute are provisioned for your instance, so a 300 GB collection of scans and a 300 GB collection of email cost the same monthly rate, and so do 100 GB and 800 GB, within the instance’s capacity. Review effort still scales with documents, as it does everywhere; what changes is that the hosting line stops scaling with them too. The pricing page publishes the rate in full, and the cost calculator models it against per-GB billing over a matter’s life. See what the platform includes, or book a walkthrough.
Sources
- RAND Institute for Civil Justice, Where the Money Goes: Understanding Litigant Expenditures for Producing Electronic Discovery (Pace & Zakaras, 2012).
- Industry page-per-gigabyte conversion tables as used in service-provider estimates and court filings.
- Published analysis of ~2,000 hosted matters / 150M+ documents (documents-per-GB rule of thumb).
eDiscovery at one flat monthly rate
$3,250 a month on a 12-month agreement. No per-user fees and no per-GB hosting charges.
Common questions
How many documents are in 1 GB?
Roughly 10,000 emails, 5,000 loose Office files, 2,500 presentations or 1,200 scanned images, using widely cited rules of thumb derived from analysis of hosted matters. A mixed collection typically lands between 5,000 and 8,000 documents per GB.
How many pages is a megabyte?
Divide the per-gigabyte figure by 1,024. Email is about 100 pages per MB, Word documents about 65, scanned images about 15.
How many pages is 300 gigabytes?
At a typical mixed profile of about 70,000 pages per GB, roughly 21 million pages and 2 million documents. If it were all scanned images, about 4.6 million pages; all email, about 30 million.
How many pages in a GB of PDF?
It depends on what the PDF contains. A text-based PDF exported from Word runs around 65,000 pages per GB. A scanned, image-only PDF runs closer to 15,500 because each page is a picture rather than text.