Unlock PDF

Unlocking means opening the document with its password and writing a new copy that does not need one. The decrypted content only ever exists in your browser's memory, which is the reason to do this locally rather than by sending a confidential file and its password to a server.

Everything happens inside this page. Your file is read by JavaScript running on your own machine, and no part of it is sent anywhere.

This tool needs the password

There is no way around that and no version of this tool that avoids it. The document's contents are encrypted with a key derived from the password, so without it there is nothing to read, only noise.

Any site claiming to remove a password you do not know is either working on files that were never really encrypted, or spending a very long time guessing. Neither is happening here.

The case where there is no password to type

Some PDFs open with no prompt but refuse to let you print or copy. Those have an owner password set and no user password, which means the content is not encrypted against you at all. The restriction is a flag that readers choose to respect.

For those files, unlocking removes the flag and gives you a document with no restrictions. You will not be asked for anything, because there is nothing to decrypt.

When you should be doing this

The normal reasons are dull and legitimate: a bank statement that arrives encrypted with your date of birth every month and is a nuisance to open, an archive whose password you set years ago, a document you need to merge with others and the merge tool cannot read while it is locked.

The reason it is worth saying plainly is that this is a tool for the owner of a file, not a way into someone else's. Removing protection from a document you have no right to open is not something this tool enables, and it is not something we would want it to.

What comes out

A normal PDF with the same pages, text and images, and no encryption. Any watermark that was drawn on the pages stays, because a watermark is page content rather than a restriction.

Two things do not survive, and it is worth knowing before you start. Interactive form fields may stop being fillable, because removing the encryption means rebuilding the document and the form definition lives at the document level rather than on the pages. Digital signatures are broken, because the file is no longer the exact bytes that were signed. If you need the form to stay interactive, fill it before unlocking rather than after.