Redact a PDF for free, properly

1. Drop or pick a PDF: a bank statement, a contract, a scan. Its pages render right here, in your browser.

2. Drag a black box over each name, number or signature. Or press Auto-detect to box emails, card numbers, IBANs, US Social Security numbers and API keys on every page.

3. Download the result. The new PDF is built from page images, so the covered text is gone from the file, not hidden under a shape.

A black rectangle drawn over text in Preview or a PDF editor usually does not remove the text — the characters stay in the file's text layer, and a select-all, a copy-paste or one pdftotext command brings them back. Court filings and government releases have leaked exactly this way, repeatedly.

This tool cannot make that mistake by construction: the export contains only page images. Every page is rasterized, boxed and re-encoded, so there is no text object left to extract — and blurring instead of blacking out has its own risks, which we measured across 480 cases.

Read the blur recovery study

Pick Blur or Pixelate in the effect menu and the same boxes soften the area instead of covering it — useful for a sample document, a report that shows a real screen, or a page you want to share without it looking censored. The export is still flattened, so the blurred text is gone from the text layer as well.

Blur only where readability does not matter. Small blurred text can often be read back — the recovery study linked above measured how often — so for names, account numbers and anything legal, keep the default solid redaction.

There are five common ways to black out part of a PDF. Only some of them remove the text — the rest just cover it.

Acrobat Pro does it properly, but the free Acrobat Reader cannot redact at all. In Preview, a black rectangle is an annotation lying on top of the text; if your version has a dedicated Redact command, use that instead of a shape — and test the result. In Word or Google Docs, a black highlight leaves the words in place, so delete them in the source before exporting. Online sites can work, but they require uploading exactly the document you are trying to protect.

Whatever tool you use, test the file before you send it. It takes a minute:

1. 1

   Open the redacted PDF, press Ctrl+A (⌘A on a Mac) and copy. Paste into a text editor — none of the redacted words should appear.

2. 2

   Search the file (Ctrl+F) for a name or a number you removed. It should find nothing.

3. 3

   Open File → Properties and look for an author, a title or other metadata you did not mean to send.

4. 4

   If you use a terminal, run pdftotext on the file: it prints every piece of text the PDF still contains.

Redact what the recipient does not need, not only what looks sensitive. A short checklist for the documents people send most:

• Bank statement

  Account and card numbers, IBAN, your address, balances you do not need to show, and payee names that reveal more than the request requires.

• Tax return or payslip

  Tax and social security numbers, employer IDs, salary lines beyond what was asked for, your home address.

• Contract or NDA

  Signatures, personal contact details, confidential prices or terms, and the names of third parties.

• Medical record

  Patient and insurance numbers, date of birth, and diagnoses unrelated to the request.

• ID or passport scan

  The document number, the machine-readable lines at the bottom and your date of birth — keep only what the recipient actually asked to see.

• Court or public-records filing

  Names of minors and witnesses, personal data that is irrelevant to the case, and anything the court's rules require you to withhold.

Landlords, lenders and agencies often ask for a statement but only need your name, the bank and a few balances. Drop the PDF in and press Auto-detect: it boxes IBANs, card numbers and email addresses on every page. Then drag boxes by hand over the rest: your address, account numbers that are not IBANs, payee names and any lines the request does not cover. The download has no text layer, so nobody can copy the numbers out from under the boxes.

The documents people redact — statements for a landlord, contracts, medical records — are exactly the files that should never be uploaded to a converter site. This page does everything in your browser: the PDF stays on your device, works offline once loaded, and there is nothing on our servers to leak. And because the output file is rebuilt from scratch, the original's metadata — author, title, editing history — is gone without a separate 'remove metadata' step.

Just need to hide something in a screenshot or photo? You can blur part of an image the same way: in your browser, with nothing uploaded.

The tool loads the first 40 pages of a PDF. For a longer file, split it first and redact each part. The export has no text layer, so it is not searchable and can be larger than the original. That is the cost of nothing being left to copy. If you need searchable text again, run OCR on the redacted copy; the covered parts will not come back.