Unlock PDF (Remove a Known Password)

How to use the Unlock PDF tool

1. Choose the locked PDF, or drop it on the box above.
2. Type the password you normally use to open it.
3. Press Unlock. The work happens on your device.
4. Download the copy, which now opens with no password.

What this tool does, and what it refuses to do

It removes encryption from a PDF using a password you supply. That is the whole job. The document is decrypted with the key your password produces, exactly as a PDF reader does when you type it, and the decrypted copy is written out.

What it will not do is work without the password. There is no dictionary, no list of common passwords, no attempt at brute force and no "try to recover" button. If you do not have the password, this page cannot help you, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or quietly point you somewhere that will.

That is a deliberate line. Removing a password you know from your own bank statement is housekeeping. Opening a file you were not given the password to is something else entirely, and tools that blur the two do their users no favours.

Why so many PDFs arrive locked

Banks, insurers, payroll systems and government portals email statements encrypted with something they already know about you - a date of birth, part of an account number, a PAN or a customer reference. It is a sensible default for email, which is not a private medium.

It becomes a nuisance once the file is safely on your own device. Every time you open it you type the password; search inside your own documents does not work; attaching it to an application form means the recipient needs the password too, and telling them what it is rather defeats the point.

Removing the password from your local copy fixes all of that. The email in your inbox is still encrypted; the copy on your disk, behind your own device password, no longer needs its own.

What stays the same

Everything except the encryption. Pages, text, fonts, images, links, bookmarks, form fields and quality are untouched, because the file is not re-created - the same objects are written out without the encryption layer wrapped round them.

File size stays about the same too. Encryption does not compress, so removing it changes almost nothing. If you tick "optimise for fast opening", the file is also rearranged so a reader can show the first page before the rest has loaded, which is useful for large documents on the web.

The work is done by QPDF, a long-standing open-source PDF tool, compiled to WebAssembly so it runs inside your browser instead of on a server. It is listed with its licence on our Licences page.

Passwords, permissions and the honest caveat

PDFs have two kinds of password. A user password is needed to open the file at all. An owner password leaves the file readable but marks it as not to be printed, copied or edited.

This tool is for the first kind. It asks for a password, checks that the file really is encrypted, and refuses politely if it is not - because re-saving an unprotected PDF to "unlock" it would be theatre. If a file opens for you without a password but will not let you print, that is an owner password, and the honest advice is to go back to whoever sent it rather than look for a way round their restriction.

Nothing here is stored. The password lives in the page for as long as the conversion takes, is cleared from the field as soon as it finishes, and is never written to storage of any kind.

Nothing is uploaded, which matters more here than anywhere

Files are not uploaded - everything happens in your browser. For this tool in particular, think about what the alternative means: uploading an encrypted bank statement and its password to a website you know nothing about. That is handing a stranger both the safe and the key.

Here, the file is read locally, decrypted locally, and handed to your downloads folder. Nothing is transmitted, so there is no server log, no temporary file on someone else's disk and nothing to delete afterwards.

The decryption engine is a one-time download of roughly 2 MB, fetched only after you choose a file, and cached by your browser afterwards.

One habit worth keeping: once you have an unlocked copy, store it somewhere your device already protects rather than in a shared folder or an email draft. The password was doing a job, and the copy you just made no longer has it.