2026-06-13 · all guides

KDP Bleed Settings: When You Need Bleed and How to Set It

What bleed is and why printers require it

Bleed is extra image area that extends past the final trim line of the page. Printing presses cut stacks of paper with slight mechanical variance, sometimes a sixteenth of an inch or more. If your ink stops exactly at the page edge, that variance produces a hairline of unprinted white along the edge of some copies.

The fix is to extend any edge-touching content beyond the trim line so the cut always lands inside ink. KDP specifies a bleed of 0.125 inches, an eighth of an inch, on the outer edges of interior pages that contain full-bleed elements.

Bleed is a property of the interior PDF you upload. It is not a checkbox that KDP applies for you; you must build the file at the correct size and tell KDP during setup that your file includes bleed.

Does your book actually need bleed?

Most books do not. If your interior is text with normal margins, chapter headers, and images that sit inside the text block, select the no-bleed option and upload a PDF at exactly your trim size. Adding bleed to a text-only book gains nothing and creates one more way to get dimensions wrong.

You need bleed when any element is meant to touch the trimmed edge of the page: full-page photographs, chapter-opener art that runs off the page, colored side tabs, or background tints that cover the whole page. Cookbooks, photo books, and illustrated books for children are the usual cases.

Bleed is all or nothing at the file level. If even one page in your book needs bleed, the entire interior PDF must be built at the bleed page size, because KDP requires every page in the file to share the same dimensions. You cannot mix trim-sized text pages with bleed-sized image pages in one upload; the text pages simply carry unused bleed area.

A common mistake is enabling bleed in KDP but uploading a PDF sized at plain trim. KDP will either reject the file or scale it, and scaling shifts your margins. The file size and the setting must agree.

The exact math for a bleed-enabled PDF

With bleed, you add 0.125 inches to three sides of each page: the top, the bottom, and the outside edge. You do not add bleed to the inside edge, because that edge is bound into the spine and never trimmed.

In practice that means page width grows by 0.125 inches and page height grows by 0.25 inches. A 6 x 9 book with bleed uses pages of 6.125 x 9.25 inches. A 8.5 x 11 book with bleed uses 8.625 x 11.25 inches.

Your live content still needs to respect margins measured from the final trim line, not from the bleed edge. Keep text at least 0.25 inches inside the trim on the outside edges, and respect the gutter requirement for your page count: 0.375 inches up to 150 pages, 0.5 inches for 151 to 300, 0.625 inches for 301 to 500, and 0.75 inches for 501 to 700 pages.

Bleed on the cover is not optional

Interior bleed depends on your content, but cover bleed is always required. The wraparound cover file includes 0.125 inches of bleed on every outer edge. The full wrap width is 0.125 inches plus the back cover, plus the spine width, plus the front cover, plus a final 0.125 inches.

Cover height works the same way: trim height plus 0.125 inches of bleed at the top and 0.125 inches at the bottom. For a 6 x 9 book, the cover canvas is 9.25 inches tall regardless of page count.

Because the cut line wanders, keep logos, text, and anything that must not be clipped at least 0.25 inches inside the trim line on the cover, and remember the spine has its own tighter tolerance: spine text needs 0.0625 inches of clearance from each spine edge.

Checking your file before upload

Open your exported PDF and check the page dimensions in the document properties. For a no-bleed 6 x 9 book they should read exactly 6 x 9 inches; for a bleed book, exactly 6.125 x 9.25. Any other number means your export settings are wrong.

Then use the KDP previewer after upload and step through every page that has edge-touching content, confirming the artwork extends fully to the bleed edge with no white slivers. Tools that generate print interiors automatically, such as ebookdone, size the PDF and margins for you, but the previewer check is still worth the five minutes.

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