Remove a PDF password, free
Enter the PDF's password and download it as an unprotected copy. The document and the password both stay in your browser — neither is uploaded anywhere.
Drop the protected PDF here, or choose a file
The document stays in your browser — we never upload it.
You can drop several PDFs at once — up to ten, with one password. Any file this password does not open says so on its own row, and the rest are still finished.
What this tool does — and what it does not
It opens the PDF with the password you supply and saves it without encryption. The result is the same document, with the same pages and the same searchable text, only without a password and without restrictions. So it can be printed, copied, merged and edited with no further hassle.
What it does not do: it does not crack the password. If you do not know it, this page cannot help — and anyone promising otherwise is either guessing from a dictionary or simply uploading your file to a server. AES-256 cannot be worked around. One thing surprises many people, though: a great many "protected" PDFs in fact only carry restrictions and have no opening password at all. In that case this page lifts the restrictions without any password — and it detects that as soon as you drop the file in.
Why does it matter where it runs?
Think about what kind of file you want to take a password off: an employment contract, a pay slip, a bank statement, a discharge summary, an invoice. On an upload-based site that document arrives unencrypted on a stranger's server — and the password comes with it, since you have to type that in too. What happens to them afterwards is a sentence in a privacy policy.
This page sends nothing. qpdf — the open-source PDF engine Linux distributions have shipped for fifteen years — runs in your browser, compiled to WebAssembly, on a worker of its own. Before the first use your browser downloads a file of about 2 MB; after that it even works in airplane mode. You can check it on the network tab: your file does not appear in a single request.
Is this allowed?
Removing a password you know from your own documents is entirely fine — the typical case is exactly that a bank or an employer sent a password-protected PDF and you do not fancy typing it in every time you open it. The same goes for anything you received legitimately. It does not help with anything you have no right to access: without the password it does not open, and we do not open it.
Frequently asked questions
I forgot the password. Can you crack it?
No. The content of the PDF is locked with real encryption, and the key is derived from the password — without the password there is nothing to open. It is still worth dropping the file in, though: if it turns out to carry only restrictions, we can lift those without a password.
Can you see my password?
No. The password you type goes to exactly one place: the worker running in your browser, which discards it when the run ends. It does not go over the network, it does not end up in the URL, we do not store it in your browser, and none of it reaches our analytics in any form — not even how long it was.
Do the searchable text and the quality survive?
Yes. The structure of the document is preserved: the pages, the fonts, the images and the bookmarks stay the same, and the text stays selectable and searchable. There is no re-encoding, so there is no quality loss either. The file is usually slightly smaller too, because encrypted content compresses worse than plain content.
Why does it say "not password protected"?
Because there is no encryption in the file. If a program still asks you for a password, that does not come from the PDF but from the program itself or from a storage service — in which case it has to be sorted out there.
Is there a file size limit?
There is no set limit, but the operation runs in your browser's memory, so a document over 100 MB can be slower and on a weaker device can stall altogether. The page warns you in advance when that applies.
Would you rather protect a PDF? Here is the PDF password tool.