How much bleed do you need for printing?

Usually 3 mm (0.125 in) beyond the finished edge, on every side that gets trimmed. Adobe calls 0.125 in (3 mm) the typical industry-standard bleed and, in the same sentence, tells you to verify it with your print provider. That is the real answer: 3 mm is the common figure, and the number that counts is the one your printer publishes.

What bleed is

Paper is not cut exactly on the line. The cutter moves a little, and so does the sheet. If your background colour or photo stops exactly at the trim line, a small shift leaves a thin white edge. Bleed is the extra artwork that continues past the trim line so that a small shift cuts through colour instead of paper. Adobe describes the bleed area as the place for objects that extend past the page edge, so there are no white gaps after trimming.

Bleed is cut off. Nothing you put in the bleed area is meant to be seen in the finished piece, which is why backgrounds and photos belong there and text does not.

How much bleed, by situation

Two things in that table are easy to miss. First, a book interior is not trimmed the same way on every side, so KDP asks for bleed on three edges rather than four. Second, 0.125 in is 3.175 mm, which is why you will see it written as both 3 mm and 3.2 mm depending on who rounds it.

How big should the page be?

Add the bleed to the finished size. With 3 mm of bleed on all four sides, each dimension grows by 6 mm.

Books follow a different formula because only three edges get bleed. KDP gives the rule and an example: the width is the trim width plus 0.125 in, the height is the trim height plus 0.25 in, so a 6 × 9 in book becomes 6.125 × 9.25 in with bleed.

Bleed is not a margin

Bleed goes outward, past the trim. A margin (or safe area) goes inward, so that text and logos are not cut or crowded. You need both. KDP lists minimum outside margins of 0.25 in for books without bleed and 0.375 in (9.6 mm) for books with bleed. Canva's advice is the same idea in one line: extend backgrounds into the bleed, not text.

How to add bleed

Extend the artwork. Do not stretch the finished design to fill a larger page, because that changes its size.

• InDesign. Set the bleed values in File > Document Setup. When you export to Adobe PDF (Print), check the Marks and Bleeds tab of the export dialog. View > Screen Mode > Bleed shows the bleed area on screen.
• Canva. Turn on File > Settings > Show print bleed to see the bleed edge. To download it, choose Share > Download, set the file type to PDF Print and tick Crop marks and bleed.
• Other software. Look for a bleed field in the document setup or in the export dialog. If there is none, make the page larger by the amounts in the table above and extend your backgrounds to the new edge.

Whatever you use, export a PDF, then check the file you are actually going to send rather than the design you think you exported.

What a bleed check reports

We ran three small test PDFs of an A5 flyer (148 × 210 mm) through the Bleed & Trim Checker with the Flyer profile, which asks for 3 mm on every side, telling it that the design reaches the edge. These are generated test files, not customer files.

The same kind of check on a 6 × 9 in book interior page with no bleed, using the Book interior profile, reports No bleed and asks for 3.2 mm on the top, bottom and outside edges.

One limit matters here. The check reads the page geometry: the page size, the TrimBox and the BleedBox. It does not look at your artwork, so it cannot tell whether your background really reaches into the bleed. A page can have exactly the right size and still show a white edge if the artwork stops at the trim line. Look at the exported PDF as well.

Mistakes that cause most bleed problems

• Setting bleed in the layout but not exporting it, so the PDF is the finished size again.
• Adding a thin bleed, such as 1 mm, because the artwork looked fine on screen.
• Placing text or a logo inside the bleed area, where it is cut off.
• Adding bleed to the binding edge of a book when the printer asks for three edges only.
• Sending a PDF with bleed but no TrimBox. A checker then has to ask you for the finished size, because it cannot know where the page is cut.

What to do next

Find the bleed figure on your printer's template or file-setup page, add it to your page size, export a PDF and check it. If the file also contains images, the next question is resolution, covered in What DPI do you need for printing?. If a printer rejected a PDF for fonts, see PDF fonts not embedded: what it means and how to fix it. For how these checks work and what they leave out, read how Check Before Submit works.