Drop the locked document into the emerald zone below and type the password that opens it. The encryption comes off a copy and you get an ordinary PDF back, with no prompt and no restrictions. This works only on a document you can already open: one you hold the password for, or one that opens instantly and only blocks printing and copying. A large share of "locked" files are in that second group and need no password at all, and this tool clears them in one press. The file and the password stay in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded. There is no guessing and no wordlist.
Your files are read by JavaScript running on your own machine. There is no upload, no queue, and no copy on our server to delete later.
Drag a card to reorder it, or use the arrows under each card. The order here is the order in the output. Each card is a preview of the finished page, so what you see is what the PDF will contain.
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Starting
This is your processor doing the work, so the time it takes depends on your machine and not on how many other people are on the site.
The tool above works right now. The guide below explains the two completely different things people mean when they say a PDF is locked, why one of them comes off without a password and the other genuinely cannot, what actually happens to the bytes when the encryption is removed, and where this tool draws a hard line that it will not cross for anybody.
It takes under a minute. This PDF password remover runs inside the page you are reading, on your own processor. Neither the document nor the password is transmitted anywhere, which matters more here than on almost any other tool, because you are about to type a secret into a web page.
Drop the PDF into the zone above. Every other tool in this suite refuses a locked file and sends you here; this one is built for exactly that file, so the card showing "Locked" is expected rather than a problem.
Press the button and the engine reads the encryption dictionary, which is the one part of a protected PDF that is deliberately in the clear. It reports the cipher and tests the empty password first. If the document only carries an owner password it opens with no prompt at all and the tool goes straight through.
A dialog asks for it, checks it against the file in your own browser, and tells you immediately if it is wrong. The check runs the same key derivation the removal does, so a password that passes here cannot fail a moment later, and a typo costs you a retry rather than one of the operations in your allowance. Either the open password or the owner password works. Neither can be guessed for you: without one of them the document stays shut.
The engine decrypts every stream and every string, drops the encryption dictionary, rebuilds the cross-reference table from measured offsets and hands you a normal PDF. It opens with no prompt, prints, copies and edits, and can be fed to any other tool in the suite.
People arrive here having said "my PDF is password protected", and they mean one of two completely different things. Which one decides whether this takes one click or needs a secret you may not have.
| What you see | What it is | What is needed |
|---|---|---|
| The file opens straight away, but printing, copying or editing is greyed out. | An owner password, also called a permissions password. The content is encrypted with a key the document hands to anybody who opens it, and the restrictions are a note asking readers to behave. | Nothing. Press the button and the restrictions come off. This is the majority of cases. |
| A prompt appears and there is nothing to read until you type something. | A user password, also called an open password. This is real encryption doing real work. | The password. There is no way round it and this tool does not pretend otherwise. |
The tool tests the first case automatically. It tries the empty password against the file before it asks you for anything, because an owner-only document is technically encrypted with a password of nothing. If that succeeds you never see a dialog.
Why an owner password comes off so easily. Removing it needs no secret, because there is no secret. The document already gave you the decryption key when it opened. All the restriction ever was is a flag saying "please do not print this", and stripping a flag is not cryptography. Anybody telling you an owner password is security is selling something.
Sometimes a file that "will not open" is not encrypted at all. A truncated download, a transfer that mangled the line endings, or a save that was interrupted produces a document a reader refuses with a message about damage or an unsupported format. That is Repair PDF, not this tool, and this tool will tell you which one you have.
Worth stating plainly, near the top, because the phrase people search is often ambiguous and the answer here is not.
What it is for is the ordinary, legitimate and extremely common situation: you have the password, you are entitled to the document, and you are tired of typing it every time - or of not being able to print your own bank statement, sign your own contract, or feed your own invoice to another tool. Removing a password you hold from a document you own is not circumvention. It is housekeeping.
The one rule. Use this on documents you are authorized to open. If a file arrived with restrictions attached by somebody who had the right to attach them, taking them off may breach an agreement even though the mechanics are trivial. The tool cannot know your circumstances and does not pretend to. That judgment is yours.
This is the part almost no tool explains, and it is why so many of them quietly corrupt files. Removing encryption from a PDF is not one operation, it is four, and skipping any of them produces a document that looks fine until somebody opens it.
Step four is the one that separates a working tool from a broken one. A tool that decrypts the streams and keeps the original index produces a file whose table points into the middle of nowhere, and the symptom is a document that opens in one reader and fails in another, which is the hardest kind of bug for a user to report.
A detail people find surprising. In revisions 2 to 4, the owner password is used to encrypt the user password, and the result is stored in the file. Give the tool the owner password and it decrypts that field, gets the user password back, and proceeds exactly as if you had typed it. This is not a weakness anybody found - it is how the format was designed, so that an administrator with the owner password can always open a document.
In AES 256 the design is cleaner: both passwords independently decrypt a stored copy of the same file key, so neither reveals the other. Either one still gets you a fully unrestricted document, which is the point.
Consider what an upload based version of this tool asks you to do. Send a confidential document to a stranger's server. Then send the password that protects it to the same server. You have just handed over both halves of the secret, in order, to a machine you cannot inspect. Whatever the privacy policy says, that is the shape of the transaction.
Here the decryption runs where the file already is. The key derivation, the ciphers, the object walk and the file rebuild are all JavaScript executing in this tab. The password exists as a string in one browser process for a few seconds and is then discarded. There is no endpoint that accepts it because there is no server side to this operation.
Verify it in ten seconds. Load this page, turn off your network, and remove a password. It works. That single test is worth more than any assurance on any privacy page, and no upload based competitor can pass it.
The most common reason people land here is not a prompt at all. It is a document that opens perfectly and then refuses to do something ordinary.
In every one of those cases the restriction was a flag, the flag is gone, and the document behaves like the ordinary PDF it always was underneath. Nothing about the page content changes - same fonts, same images, same layout, same page count.
Every tool in this suite carries this section. Here is what this one cannot do.
This is almost always a step rather than a destination. The document was locked, something else needs to happen to it, and that something else cannot read a locked file.
| What you actually need | The order that works |
|---|---|
| To combine a protected statement with other documents | Remove the password here, then merge. A merger cannot read encrypted page content. |
| To sign a contract that arrived protected | Remove the password, sign it, then re-apply protection with Protect PDF if the recipient expects it. |
| To change the password on a document | Remove the old one here, then set the new one with Protect PDF. There is no in-place change in the format. |
| To pull the text out of a protected report | Remove the password, then convert it to Word or to Markdown. |
| To take something out of it permanently | Remove the password, then redact. A password over a document that still contains the secret protects only the file, never the information. |
If the document was protected for a reason, put the protection back when you are done. Protect PDF writes AES 256 by default and runs in the same browser tab with the same guarantee. The rest of the PDF suite is built on the same architecture.
Drop the file into the zone at the top of this page and press the button. If the document only restricts printing or copying, it comes off immediately with nothing to type. If it prompts for a password to open, a dialog asks for it and checks it in your own browser. The unrestricted file downloads straight away with no watermark and no account needed for a first run.
Only when the document has no open password to begin with - which is very common. A file that restricts printing or copying but opens with no prompt needs no password at all, and this tool clears it in one press. If the document genuinely prompts before it will open, the password is required. There is no cracking here, no wordlist and no recovery mode.
No, and neither is the password. The file is read from your disk by the browser, decrypted in memory, and written back to your downloads folder. The password exists in this tab for a few seconds and is then gone. You can prove it by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads and using the tool anyway.
It carries an owner password rather than an open password. The content is encrypted with a key the document hands to anybody who opens it, and the print restriction is a flag asking readers to refuse. Removing it needs no secret, because there is no secret - which is exactly what this tool does in one press.
Yes, either one produces a fully unrestricted file. In older revisions the owner password actually decrypts a stored copy of the user password, which is by design so an administrator can always open a document. In AES 256 both independently recover the same file key.
No. Every page, font, image, annotation, bookmark and form field is preserved exactly - they are the same bytes, stored without encryption. The only things that change are the encryption dictionary, which is deleted, and the cross-reference table, which is rebuilt from measured offsets.
All five revisions of the standard security handler: RC4 at 40 and 128 bit, AES 128 and AES 256. That covers everything Acrobat, Word, LibreOffice and every mainstream tool has produced since the format existed. Vendor specific rights management handlers are detected and reported by name rather than silently failing.
Removing protection from a document you are authorized to open is ordinary housekeeping, and it is what this tool is for. Using it on a document you have no right to open is not, and this tool cannot help you do that anyway because it has no way to obtain a password you do not have. If restrictions were attached under an agreement you signed, that agreement still applies. Check with whoever owns the document if you are unsure.
No, that is a different problem and this tool will tell you so. A damaged file has a broken structure rather than encryption, usually from a truncated download or an interrupted save. Repair PDF rebuilds the index by walking the file rather than trusting it.
Two reasons. Decrypted streams lose the initialization vector and padding that the cipher added, which makes them smaller. Compressed object containers are unpacked so that every object is individually addressable, which makes the file larger. The net is usually within a few percent either way, and every byte offset in the result is measured rather than copied.
Not in one run. Each document has its own password and its own encryption, so they are handled one at a time. If you have a batch protected with the same password, run them individually and then merge the results if that is what you needed.
Yes. The whole engine is JavaScript, so it runs in mobile Safari, Chrome on Android and anything else current. The password dialog is built for a touch keyboard and has a reveal button, because typing a long password blind on a phone is how people get locked out of their own documents.
No. The output is your document, without encryption, and nothing else. No stamps, no banners, no trial notice, no attribution link. It is ready to send, print or feed to another tool immediately.
Not for a first run. A visitor who is not signed in gets one operation every twelve hours, counted by network fingerprinting rather than by anything stored about the file. A free CartHacker account raises that to two in the same twelve hour window, and CartHacker Premium removes the limit. The tier changes nothing about the processing - the decryption is local and identical at every level.
All of these run the same way: your file is read by JavaScript on your own machine, the work happens on your processor, and the result is handed back to you as a download that never existed anywhere else.
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