Repair a Damaged or Corrupt PDF

Yes, completely free. Our Repair 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 it does have to be a PDF: a file from another format renamed to .pdf cannot be repaired into one.

Yes, and there is nothing extra to configure on a small screen. Upload the damaged file, choose a repair mode, download the result. The one mobile caveat is that a file which failed to download properly on the phone in the first place is usually better re-downloaded than repaired.

The tool addresses the most common corruption types: damaged cross-reference tables (making pages inaccessible), broken object streams (causing blank pages or rendering errors), missing EOF markers, and structural malformation from incomplete file saves or downloads. It cannot recover content from files where the data itself is physically overwritten or encrypted without the key. Severely fragmented files may only be partially recoverable.

The common one is a download that stopped short. A file that should have been twelve megabytes arrives as nine, the reader reports it as damaged or shows a run of blank pages, and the sender has since deleted the original. Because a PDF keeps an index of where every object lives and writes that index at the very end, a truncated file loses its map while most of the content is still sitting there intact. Rebuilding the map by walking the file directly is what recovers those pages.

Then those pages were genuinely not in the file. Repair reconstructs the structure around content that survived; it cannot reproduce bytes that never arrived or were overwritten. A truncated download usually loses the end of the document, so expect the damage to cluster at the back rather than scatter evenly. Save what came back, because a partial recovery is often enough to identify the document and request the right replacement — and never overwrite the damaged original, since a different approach may do better with it later.

No, and running repair on it will not help. A password prompt means the file is intact and encrypted, which is a completely different situation from a damaged structure — use Unlock PDF with the password. Equally, a document that opens perfectly but looks wrong is not corrupt: pages that appear sideways need Rotate PDF, and text you cannot select was never text to begin with, which is a job for OCR PDF.

Nothing is invented — that is the important part. The tool scans the file for intact objects, works out which are pages and which are the fonts and images those pages depend on, and writes a fresh index describing what it found. Content that survives is carried across byte for byte rather than regenerated, so a recovered page is the original page and not an approximation. Where an object is unreadable it is dropped rather than guessed at, because a plausible-looking reconstruction of a contract would be considerably worse than a visible gap.