To provide an excellent white polyester film that has a sufficiently high luminance property required for a backlight unit based on the sidelight system and a method for producing the same.

The white polyester film is obtained by performing first vertical drawing of a polyester sheet containing a void forming agent with a magnification of 1.1 times or more by a roller heating drawing method, performing second vertical drawing with a magnification of 1.1 times or more by a noncontact heater-heating drawing method, performing a multistage vertical drawing to have a magnification (for vertical drawing) of 2.0 times or more in total, and then performing horizontal drawing.