Split PDF

How to split a PDF

1. Add your PDF. Drag it onto the box above or click to browse. The page count appears as soon as the file is read.
2. Choose what you want. Extract pages gives you one new PDF containing the pages you pick. Split into files breaks the document up and returns a ZIP.
3. Set the detail. For extraction, type pages and ranges like 1-3, 7, 10-12. For splitting, choose how many pages go in each file.
4. Download. You get either a single PDF or one ZIP archive, saved straight to your device.

Your file is never uploaded. Close the tab before downloading and the result is gone, because no copy exists anywhere else.

When you would need this

Sending only the relevant pages. A landlord needs two pages of a forty-page bank statement. A colleague needs the appendix, not the whole report. Extracting the pages that matter is faster for them and shares less of your information than sending the lot.

Removing pages you do not want circulated. A contract with an internal pricing annexe. A scan that picked up a page belonging to a different document. Extracting everything except those pages produces a clean version to send.

Breaking a batch scan into individual documents. Scanners often produce one long PDF from a stack of separate documents. Splitting per page, or in fixed-size groups, turns that back into individual files.

Meeting an upload size limit. Portals frequently cap uploads. Splitting a long document into parts that each fit is often quicker than trying to compress it far enough.

Reordering while you extract. Because page order is respected, entering 3,1,2 produces a document with those pages in that order — useful when a scan came out in the wrong sequence.

Tips for splitting accurately

Check the page numbers on the page, not in the file. Documents with a cover sheet or roman-numeral front matter usually have printed page numbers that do not match their position in the file. This tool counts physical pages from 1, so page "1" of a report with a cover might be the second page of the PDF. Open the document and count if you are unsure.

Use open-ended ranges for the start or end. 18- takes page 18 through to the last page without you needing to know the total, and -4 takes everything up to page 4. Both save counting.

Order matters, and that is deliberate. Entering 5-1 gives you those five pages in reverse. Entering 3,1 puts page 3 first. If you only want a selection in the original order, list the ranges in ascending order.

Expect shared resources in the output. A one-page extract from a document with embedded fonts and repeated logos will not be one-fortieth of the original size. The page brings its dependencies with it. Compress afterwards if size is what you are trying to control.

Splitting large documents into many files takes a moment. Producing fifty separate PDFs means building fifty documents and then compressing them into an archive. This is real work happening on your device rather than a progress bar waiting on a server, and it is quicker than uploading would have been.

Limits and requirements

Encrypted PDFs cannot be split. A password-protected file is unreadable without its password, and this tool does not attempt to break encryption. Remove the protection first, then split the unprotected copy.

Memory is the constraint. The source document is held in memory while output files are built. Large documents split into many pieces use the most, since several documents exist at once. Closing other tabs helps. A failure produces a clear message rather than a silent stop.

Page content transfers; document structure may not. Text, images, fonts and vector graphics are copied exactly. Bookmarks, form field interactivity and links that pointed to pages left behind will not survive, because they belong to the original document structure rather than to the pages themselves.

Digital signatures are invalidated. A signature covers a whole specific document. Any file produced by splitting is a new document, so an existing signature no longer validates — correctly, since the content has changed.

Scanned pages stay images. Splitting a scanned document gives you image pages, exactly as they were. It does not perform text recognition, so the output is not searchable unless the original already was.

Privacy: how this tool handles your file

Your document never leaves your device. When you add a file, your browser reads it into memory, and all the splitting happens in your tab. There is no upload, no server-side processing, no queue, and no temporary copy on our infrastructure — because no infrastructure is involved in the operation at all.

The privacy angle is particularly relevant for splitting, because the reason people split a document is often precisely that it contains something they do not want to share. Extracting two pages from a bank statement exists as a task because the other thirty-eight pages are nobody else's business. Uploading the full statement to a stranger's server in order to remove pages from it rather defeats the purpose.

You can check this instead of trusting it. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and split a file — nothing carries your document. Or load this page, disconnect from the internet, and split anyway. It still works, because everything needed is already running on your machine.