How to Remove a Password From a PDF You Own
Short answer
Open the PDF with the password you already have, then print it to PDF — Microsoft Print to PDF on Windows, or the PDF button in the macOS print dialog. The new file has no password. This only works on documents you can already open and are entitled to copy; it is not a way around protection on someone else's file.
On this page
Before anything else: this covers removing a password from a document you own and can already open. If you cannot open the file, nothing here will help you, and nothing here is intended to. Working around protection on a document that is not yours is a different activity with different consequences, and this guide does not cover it.
With that said, the legitimate case is extremely common. Bank statements, payslips and insurance documents arrive encrypted, you type the password every single time you open one, and after the twentieth time you would quite like a copy that just opens.
Work out which password you are dealing with
PDFs support two separate passwords, and people conflate them constantly.
| Type | What it does | How you notice |
|---|---|---|
| User (open) password | The file will not open without it | A password box appears immediately |
| Owner (permissions) password | The file opens, but printing, copying or editing is blocked | Opens fine, then menu items are greyed out |
A file can carry both. The practical difference is that the user password is a real encryption key and the owner password is closer to a request that the viewer application is expected to honour — which is why removal methods differ.
Removing a user password you already know
The general approach is to open the file with the password and save a fresh copy without encryption.
Print to PDF — works everywhere
This is the method that needs no extra software on any modern computer.
- Open the PDF and enter the password.
- Press Ctrl+P (Windows) or Cmd+P (macOS).
- Choose the PDF output:
- Windows: select Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer.
- macOS: click the PDF dropdown at the bottom left → Save as PDF.
- Save under a new name. The copy opens with no password.
What you lose matters more than what you gain here. Printing re-renders every page as a fresh document, so bookmarks, clickable links, form fields and file attachments do not come through. On a scanned statement that is nothing. On an interactive form it is most of the document.
Size is also unpredictable. A print-to-PDF pass sometimes produces a noticeably larger file, because the renderer re-encodes images at print resolution. If that happens, running the result through our PDF compressor usually recovers it, and why PDFs end up large explains what the re-render actually did.
Chrome or Edge as the renderer
If your PDF viewer makes printing awkward, drag the file into Chrome or Edge, enter the password, then print to PDF from there. Same mechanism, slightly more reliable rendering on files that confuse desktop viewers.
macOS Preview
Preview can do it without a print pass, which preserves more of the document. Open the file, enter the password, then File → Export as PDF and leave the encryption option unticked. The result is a direct re-save rather than a re-render, so links and bookmarks survive more often.
Removing an owner password
If the file opens but Print is greyed out, you are dealing with permissions rather than encryption.
Acrobat Pro handles this properly when you have the owner password: File → Properties → Security, set the security method to No Security, and supply the password when asked. That writes a genuinely unrestricted file with nothing re-rendered.
Without the owner password, the honest position is that you should go back to whoever applied it. Permissions flags are weakly enforced and plenty of software ignores them, but “the lock is flimsy” is not the same as “the lock is yours to open”. If the restriction is inconvenient and the document is legitimately yours, the issuer can send an unrestricted copy.
When you have forgotten the password on your own file
This happens, and there is no clever answer.
If the PDF came from an institution, the password is almost always derived from
your own details in a pattern they publish in the covering email — a date of
birth as DDMMYYYY, a postcode with no space, the last four digits of an account
number. Finding that email is faster than anything else you might try.
If you set the password yourself when exporting and cannot remember it, check whether the source document still exists. Re-exporting from the original Word file or the original scan takes a minute and gives you a clean file. That is very often the real fix, and people skip it because it feels like going backwards.
If neither applies, the document is effectively gone. Strong PDF encryption is designed to resist exactly the attack you would be attempting, and anything advertising itself as able to do it quickly is either lying, charging you for a dictionary attack that will probably fail, or something you should not be uploading a financial document to.
Stopping the problem recurring
Once you have an unprotected copy, store it somewhere that is itself protected rather than leaving a decrypted statement in your Downloads folder.
- Encrypted volume or disk encryption — BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on macOS — protects everything at rest without you typing a password per file.
- A password manager’s secure file storage suits documents you need rarely.
- Your cloud drive’s own protection, if the account has two-factor authentication enabled.
If you are the one applying passwords to documents you send out, apply them at export time rather than afterwards. Word, Google Docs and most accounting packages all offer it in their PDF export dialog, and the result is cleaner than encrypting an existing PDF.
What to expect
For a statement or payslip, print to PDF takes under a minute and the result is indistinguishable from the original in everyday use. For anything with form fields, links or a searchable text layer from OCR, test the output before deleting the encrypted original — the text layer in particular is the thing most likely to vanish quietly, and why text in a scanned PDF is not selectable covers how to check whether it survived.
Keep the original either way until you are sure. An encrypted copy you can still open is worth more than a decrypted copy missing half the document.