Remove the password from a PDF
🔒 Your files never leave your device
Stop typing the same password every time you open your bank statement. Drop the file in below, enter the password once, and download a copy without it. Neither the document nor the password is uploaded — everything happens inside this page.
or drop it here
There are two different locks, and they are nothing alike
Almost every confusing thing about PDF passwords comes from the fact that the format has two, and most tools never say which one you are dealing with.
The open password — the specification calls it the user password — is real encryption. The contents of the file are genuinely scrambled, and without the password there is nothing to read. This is what your bank uses when it sends a statement you have to unlock with your date of birth. To remove it you have to know it. The tool asks, checks it by actually decrypting the document, and only then offers you a copy.
The permissions password — the owner password — is a completely different animal. The file opens for anybody, with no prompt at all, and simply carries a note saying it should not be printed, copied or edited. Acrobat and most other readers respect that note voluntarily. Nothing about the content is protected by it. That is why this tool can lift such a restriction without asking you for anything: there is no password on the document to supply, only a flag to stop repeating.
When you add a file, the tool tells you which of the two you have, which is usually the answer people are actually looking for.
What this cannot do
It cannot recover a password you have forgotten. There is no clever trick being withheld here — for an encrypted PDF, the password is the key, and a tool without it has nothing to work with but guessing. If you have lost the open password to a document, this page cannot help you, and neither can any other page that does not intend to spend days guessing.
Which is worth saying plainly, because a good number of sites offering to "unlock" PDFs are vague on exactly this point right up until you have uploaded your file.
Why doing this locally matters more here than anywhere else
Every tool on this site runs in your browser, but on this page the difference stops being a principle and becomes obvious. Using a server-side PDF unlocker means uploading a document sensitive enough that somebody encrypted it, and handing over the password that opens it, to a machine you know nothing about.
Payslips, tax returns, medical letters and contracts are precisely the documents that arrive with passwords on them. Here the file is read by your own browser, the decryption happens in the page, and the result is written straight back to your downloads folder. There is no upload step, which is also why the tool keeps working with your network disconnected.
What survives, and what does not
Your pages come through exactly as they were. Nothing is re-rendered or re-compressed: text stays selectable, images keep their original quality and resolution, page sizes are unchanged, and the file size lands near the original.
Two things do not survive, and it is worth knowing before rather than after.Bookmarks (the outline tree in the sidebar) and form fieldsare not carried into the unlocked copy. Both hang off the document as a whole rather than off any individual page, and the only reliable way to produce a file that no reader treats as encrypted is to copy the pages into a document that never had encryption on it in the first place — which leaves those behind. If the file you are unlocking has either, the tool says so after it finishes rather than letting you find out later.
For the overwhelmingly common case — a statement, a report, a scan — there is nothing to lose. For a fillable form you intend to keep filling in, this is the wrong trade and you should keep the original.
Questions
Is it legal to remove a restriction?
It depends on your rights to the document, not on the tool. Taking the password off your own bank statement, or making a document you are licensed to use printable, is an ordinary thing to do. Stripping protection from something you have no right to redistribute is not, and the fact that it is technically easy does not change that. This page is for your own files.
My PDF opens fine but says "SECURED" in the title bar
That is the permissions case described above. Add it here and you will be told so, with no password field to fill in.
Does the password get sent anywhere or remembered?
No. It is used to decrypt the file in the page and lives in a variable until you close the tab. It is not stored, logged or transmitted — there is no server to transmit it to.
Can I put a password on a PDF instead?
Not on this page. It is technically possible to do that in the browser too, and it may get its own tool later, but adding protection and removing it are opposite jobs and mixing them into one screen is how people encrypt a file by accident.
Will the file get bigger or smaller?
Slightly different, usually smaller. Removing the encryption layer removes some structure, and the file is written out fresh, but the page content itself is copied across untouched.
Nothing downloaded when I pressed the button
Check whether the browser blocked the download — a page that has not been clicked much can trip automatic download blocking. The file is generated before the download starts, so if the status says it is done, the work succeeded.