Almost every case comes down to one of two things: the form is stored in a shared drive, or a Workspace admin policy is blocking file collection. Neither is a bug, and neither can be fixed from the question menu — which is why clearing your cache and trying another browser never works.
Cause 1: the form lives in a shared drive
Google does not offer the file upload question type on forms stored in a shared drive — only on forms in an individual's My Drive. The reason is ownership: an uploaded file has to be written into a specific person's Drive and charged against a specific person's quota, and a shared drive has no single owner to charge. Forms handles the ambiguity by removing the option rather than guessing.
The fix is to move or copy the form into your own My Drive, at which point the question type appears. Worth knowing before you reorganise anything: this works in reverse too. A form that already has a working upload question and is then moved into a shared drive loses the feature, and it cannot be turned back on until the form is moved back out. If a form that used to collect files has stopped offering the option, check where it has been filed before checking anything else.
Cause 2: a Workspace administrator policy
In a Google Workspace organisation, an administrator can restrict file collection through Forms — most commonly blocking uploads from people outside the organisation. When that policy applies, the upload question is unavailable on forms shared externally, and nothing you change inside the form will bring it back. This one is not self-service: you need your Workspace administrator to confirm the policy and decide whether to change it, and in a regulated organisation the answer is often no, for reasons that are good ones.
Before you try what the forums suggest
Incognito windows, a different browser, signing out and back in, rebuilding the form — these come up constantly and they change nothing, because both real causes are properties of where the form is stored and what your organisation permits, not of your browser session. If you have already tried them and the option is still grey, that is not a sign you did it wrong. Check the form's location first, then ask your administrator.
The limits waiting once the question works
Getting the question added is the first half. These are the constraints that decide whether it holds up in practice, and most of them are worth setting deliberately rather than discovering later:
- Per-file maximum: chosen from a fixed set of sizes when you configure the question, up to 10 GB per file. It is a ceiling you pick, not an unlimited allowance.
- Ten files per upload question per response. Someone with fifteen documents needs several questions, or several submissions.
- A total storage cap for the form, which starts at 1 GB and can be raised — up to 1 TB, subject to the Drive storage you actually have.
- Uploads count against the form owner's Drive quota, never the respondent's. Collecting video from thirty people is thirty people's video sitting in your account.
- When the form's cap or the owner's Drive fills up, the form stops accepting responses entirely — not just uploads. This is a common cause of a form that "worked last week."
- You can restrict the question to specific file types, which is the cheapest way to stop a request for signed PDFs coming back as phone screenshots.
The problem fixing this won't fix
Once the upload question is working, it brings its own condition with it: every respondent must sign in to a Google account to submit the form, and no setting turns that off. If the people you are collecting from are clients, applicants, or anyone outside your organisation, this is usually the wall that actually matters — the greyed-out menu was the smaller of the two problems. That one is covered in full in why Google Forms file upload requires a sign-in.
When to stop fixing the form
There is a point where the effort stops being proportionate: if you are moving forms between drives, filing a request with your administrator, and then still cannot collect from anyone outside the organisation, the form is no longer the cheap option. A dedicated upload link has none of these constraints — no shared-drive rule, no admin policy on the question type, no account required from the sender — because it writes into your Drive as you, through Google's narrow drive.file OAuth scope, rather than asking Forms to broker the write.
That is what Drive File Request does: one link per request, its own folder in your Drive, per-link size and file-count limits, and an expiry date, with senders seeing nothing but an upload page. If you would rather stay inside Google's own tooling, the Drive-native workarounds and their tradeoffs are laid out in how to create a file request link for Google Drive, and uploads that start but fail partway through are a separate class of problem covered in Google Drive upload problems.