How to remove a password from a PDF in Adobe Acrobat — or free, without it
In paid Acrobat, open the PDF with its password, choose All tools, then Protect a PDF, then Remove security, and save. Without Acrobat, Unlock PDF takes either password in your browser and downloads a copy with no encryption, form fields and bookmarks intact.
Acrobat can take a password off a PDF, but only the paid version, and only once you have typed the password in. This covers the Acrobat route as Adobe describes it, the free route when all you have is Reader, and what we found survives in the unlocked copy when we tested it.
How do I unlock a locked PDF in Adobe?
Open the PDF in paid Acrobat and enter its password. Then choose All tools, Protect a PDF, and Remove security, confirm, and save the file. Adobe's help pages describe this route, plus a second one: File, Properties, the Security tab, and Security Method set to No Security. We have not tested either inside Acrobat.
If the file only has a permissions password, Acrobat asks for that password before it removes the restrictions. Adobe's own unlock guide also says the free Acrobat Reader cannot remove security settings, which is why the option is missing when you look for it there.
How do I remove a password from a PDF without Acrobat Pro?
Open Unlock PDF in any browser, choose the file, type its password and click Unlock PDF. A copy with no encryption downloads as yourfile_unlocked.pdf, and the original is left as it was. It is free, needs no Adobe account, and the file is decrypted in the browser tab, not uploaded.
Open Unlock PDF
Go to Unlock PDF in Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox. There is nothing to install.
Choose the locked PDF
Drop the file in or click to pick it. A password box appears once it has loaded.
Type a password
Enter the password the file opens with, or its permissions password. The Unlock PDF button stays disabled while the box is empty.
Unlock and download
Click Unlock PDF. The decrypted copy downloads with _unlocked on the end of its name.
How do I change permissions on a PDF document?
Remove the permissions password, then set new rules. A file that opens freely but blocks printing or copying is guarded by a permissions password. Unlock PDF accepts that password and drops the whole lock: in our test, the unlocked copy came back with no restrictions left at all. A wrong password is refused.
Unlock PDF does not set new permission rules afterwards. It takes the lock off, nothing more. If you want a password back on, Protect PDF adds an open password, and how to password protect a PDF in Adobe Acrobat explains why it offers no edit-only tier.
What survives when the password comes off?
Everything we checked. We made locked test files with a separate PDF library, unlocked them with the real tool, and read each copy back with a third one. The title and author, both bookmarks, a filled-in form field and the text on every page all came back unchanged, and no encryption was left.
We tested four ways a PDF can be locked, from old 40-bit RC4 to 256-bit AES. Both the open password and the permissions password unlocked every one, and the password is case-sensitive: the right word in capitals was refused. In several hundred runs, one old 40-bit test file failed with a technical error instead of unlocking. We could not make it happen again, but if you see an odd error rather than "That password is incorrect", that is the likely cause.
How do I unlock my locked PDF if I forgot the password?
You cannot, in Acrobat or here. The pages are encrypted with the password, and Adobe's community answers say plainly that Acrobat cannot recover a forgotten one. Unlock PDF removes a password you know; it does not guess one. Ask whoever sent the file for an unlocked copy instead.
For the same job on other devices, see how to remove a password from a PDF, the Mac guide and how to unlock a PDF on iPhone. What a PDF password actually protects explains the two passwords in depth.
