Unlock a Password-Protected PDF

Yes, completely free. Our Unlock 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 you need the current password. This removes a password you know; it does not break one you do not.

Yes, and the only mobile detail is typing the password. Passwords are case-sensitive and mobile keyboards like to capitalise the first letter, which is the single most common reason a correct password is rejected on a phone. Paste it from your password manager if you can.

Yes — the correct password is required. This tool is designed for legitimate use: accessing your own password-protected files when the password is known. Enter the password in the provided field and the tool removes the restriction, producing an unlocked copy. If you have forgotten the password entirely and do not have the original, the tool cannot help — encrypted PDFs cannot be unlocked without the correct password without specialised (and typically illegal) brute-force methods.

Statements and payslips that arrive encrypted by the institution that issued them. You know the password — it is usually a date of birth or the last digits of an account — but being prompted every single time makes the file painful to search, print or store. Supply the password once here and you get back an ordinary PDF that opens without a prompt, which you can then merge, compress or archive like anything else. Nothing about the page content changes.

No. This is worth being unambiguous about rather than leaving you to discover it after uploading. The password is the decryption key, not a lock bolted on beside the door — without it the contents are mathematically unreadable, and there is no override, recovery route or back door to offer. Guessing at it is not something this tool attempts. Go back to whoever issued the document and ask them to reissue it, which for a bank or payroll provider is routine.

Then do it in two steps, because this tool only ever removes. Unlock with the current password to get a clean copy, then run that through Protect PDF and set whichever password you want going forward. There is no way to change a password in place: the encryption covers the whole document, so it has to come off before a new one can go on.

Identical in content, different in one respect: the encryption layer is gone. Pages, fonts, images, bookmarks, form fields and annotations all come through untouched, because decrypting does not re-render anything — it reverses the transformation that was applied to the stored data. What you lose along with the password prompt is any permission setting that was riding on it, so a document that previously refused to allow printing will now print. Your uploaded original is never modified; you receive a separate unlocked copy.