Why I built this
In April 2026 my bank emailed me a password-protected PDF statement. Mobile Safari cannot fill PDF passwords cleanly, so I needed to strip it. The first three "remove pdf password" sites I tried wanted to upload my bank statement to their servers — including, presumably, the password I had just typed. One then asked me to subscribe to "remove the watermark."
OhMyPDF Unlock runs entirely in your browser. The password is read by JavaScript on the page, used to unlock the PDF locally with pdf-lib, and then forgotten. Nothing is uploaded. This is exactly the kind of file a stranger should never see.
How to remove a PDF password
- Drop the locked PDF into the upload area, or click to browse.
- Type the password (the password you already know — we do not break encryption).
- Click Unlock and Download. A clean copy of the PDF downloads instantly.
What this tool does and does not do
- Does: remove user/owner passwords when you supply the correct one.
- Does: re-save the PDF without any encryption layer.
- Does NOT: brute-force, guess, or recover forgotten passwords.
- Does NOT: bypass copyright DRM (encryption with policy enforcement).
Privacy
Both the file and the password stay in your browser tab. There is no upload, no signup, no analytics on the password text, no watermark on the output. Open your browser's network tab and you will see zero outgoing requests when you click Unlock — proof that nothing leaves your device.
FAQ
Can this break a PDF password I do not know? No, and intentionally so. We do not brute-force, dictionary-attack, or otherwise break encryption. You must already know the password — this tool only re-saves the PDF without it. If you forgot the password, recover it from whoever sent the file.
Is the password sent to your server? No. The unlocking happens 100% in your browser using the pdf-lib JavaScript library. Your password is typed into a normal HTML input, used by browser code, and never travels over the network. You can verify with DevTools → Network — there are zero requests when you click Unlock.
What kinds of PDF protection does this remove? Both user-password (open password) and owner-password (permissions password) — provided you know the password. Once unlocked, the output is a regular unencrypted PDF that opens without prompts and allows printing, copying, and editing.
Why does the encryption check sometimes say "not encrypted"? Some PDFs ship with restrictions but no actual encryption (the /Encrypt dictionary entry is missing). Adobe Reader honors the restrictions out of politeness, but they have no cryptographic backing — re-saving the file removes them silently.
It says my PDF uses an unsupported encryption variant. What now? pdf-lib supports the common AES-128 and AES-256 variants from the PDF 1.6+ spec, but very old (RC4, 40-bit) or very new (Adobe XML Forms) encryption may fall outside its scope. For those edge cases, use a desktop tool (qpdf, Adobe Acrobat) — we cannot help in the browser.
Does the output look exactly the same as the original? Yes. The page contents, fonts, images, and metadata are preserved byte-for-byte. We do not re-render anything; we just rewrite the file structure without the encryption layer.