By PDF Professionals Team • 6 min read
We have all been there. You receive an email from your bank, your accountant, or your HR department. Attached is a PDF. You double-click it, and... "Enter Password."
You scramble to find the email that contained the code. Was it your date of birth? The last four digits of your social security number? Or that random string of letters they sent three months ago?
Security is important, especially for transmitting data over the internet. But once that file is safely stored on your secure hard drive, keeping the password on it is often just a hassle. It breaks search functionality (Spotlight or Windows Search can't read inside locked PDFs) and makes it harder to share with your own family or team.
In this comprehensive guide, we will show you exactly how to remove that password permanently using several different methods, ranging from instant online tools to built-in browser tricks.
Upload your file, enter the code once, and download a permanently unlocked version.
Unlock My PDF NowThis is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and it works surprisingly well if you don't have professional software installed. It works on the principle that if you "print" a document to a digital file, the new file is created without the original encryption.
Ctrl + P (Windows) or Cmd + P (Mac).If you want to preserve the quality, the hyperlinks, the bookmarks, and the form data of your original PDF, using a dedicated decryption tool is the superior choice. Unlike the "Print" method, a proper unlocker manipulates the file headers to remove the encryption flag without re-processing the visual data.
Our PDF Professionals Unlock Tool handles this securely in the cloud. It is particularly useful if you are on a mobile device (where "Print to PDF" is hard to manage) or if you have a batch of files.
Steps:
If you pay for the expensive Adobe Acrobat Pro subscription (not the free reader), you can remove security natively.
1. Open the file in Acrobat Pro.
2. Enter the password.
3. Click on the lock icon on the left side of the window.
4. Click "Permission Details."
5. In the "Security Method" dropdown, select "No Security."
6. Save the file.
While effective, this requires a monthly subscription that can cost upwards of $20/month. Unless you edit PDFs daily, the free online method is usually sufficient.
It is important to know what you are removing. In the PDF specification, there are two distinct "locks":
This is the most common. It stops the file from opening at all. To remove this, you must know the password. No legitimate tool can remove this without the key (unless it uses brute force, which takes years).
This is a strange one. The file opens without a password, but you cannot print it, copy text, or edit pages. Interestingly, many online tools (including ours) can remove an "Owner" password without knowing it. This is because the read-access is already granted, so the software can simply rewrite the file without the "do not print" flag.
Generally, yes. Once you have downloaded a bank statement or a medical record to your personal computer, the "transit security" that email requires is no longer needed. Your computer's login password or hard drive encryption (like BitLocker or FileVault) is what protects the file now.
However, do not remove passwords if you plan to upload the file to a public place or email it to an insecure recipient.
For an "Open" password? No. If you could, PDF encryption would be worthless. You must verify ownership by entering the password once.
If you use the "Print to PDF" method, yes, quality can degrade. If you use our Unlock Tool, no—the quality remains 100% original.
If the original PDF was a scanned image (like a photo of a document), unlocking it won't magically turn the picture into text. You would need to use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool after unlocking it.