Redact Sensitive Information in a PDF

Yes, completely free. Our Redact PDF tool has no hidden costs, no watermarks, and no registration requirement. You can process as many files as you need, each up to 100MB, at no charge. We believe professional PDF tools should be accessible to everyone — students, freelancers, and businesses alike.

Your files are fully protected. All uploads and downloads use 256-bit SSL/TLS encryption during transfer. Processing happens on our isolated Hetzner server infrastructure in Germany — your file is never shared, analysed for commercial purposes, or stored longer than necessary. Every uploaded and processed file is automatically and permanently deleted within 24 hours of processing.

Supported file types: This tool accepts PDF files up to 100MB each. One PDF at a time, and the areas to remove are drawn directly on the page preview.

Yes, but redaction is the one tool where a small screen is a real risk. You drag boxes over the content to be removed, and a fingertip is imprecise enough that a box can miss the last character of a name. Zoom in, and always open the finished file and try to select the redacted area before sending it, on any device.

Yes — the redacted content is permanently and irreversibly removed from the file. Unlike placing a black rectangle on top of text (which can be deleted to reveal the original), our redaction tool removes the underlying characters, images, or objects from the PDF data structure entirely. The output file contains no trace of the redacted content. Always open the output in a PDF reader and verify the redaction before distributing the document.

A bank statement going out as evidence, where the account number and the counterparty names have to go but the transaction dates and amounts must stay. You mark the specific text, the tool removes it from the file, and what comes back is a document you can hand over knowing the removed material is not recoverable from it. The layout is unchanged, so the statement still reads as a statement rather than as an obviously mutilated copy.

No, and this is the mistake that has embarrassed law firms and government departments in public. A rectangle is an object drawn on top of the page; the words are still underneath it, still selectable, and still recoverable by anyone who copies the text out or deletes the box. It hides the information from a casual reader and from nobody else. Redaction has to remove the content from the file itself, which is what happens here. Always open the finished document and try to select the redacted area before you send it.

Then consider what the material is before choosing. If it is a margin, a scanner artefact or a header you simply do not want to look at, Crop PDF is faster — but note it only changes the visible area and leaves the content in the file, so it is not a substitute here. If an entire page has to go, Remove Pages is cleaner than redacting everything on it. Reach for redaction when specific content inside a page you are keeping must genuinely cease to exist.

It removes what you mark, which is the content sitting on the page. Documents also carry material that never appears when you look at them — author and software names in the document properties, and on a scan the searchable text layer that sits invisibly behind the image. That hidden layer matters most: redacting the picture of a word does not automatically remove a recognised copy of it underneath. Inspect a scanned document by trying to select text in the redacted region, and check the properties panel before releasing anything sensitive.