Merge PDF

Putting several PDFs back into one document

Scanned contracts arrive one page per file. A report gets emailed as a cover letter, a body, and three appendices. Somebody on the other end needs it as a single document.

Add the files, put them in the order you want, and click Merge & download.

Before you rely on it, here is what a merge actually moves: the pages. This tool copies page content into a brand new document, so anything that lived outside the pages does not follow. Bookmarks and the document outline are gone. Fillable form fields stop being fillable. Links that jumped to another page inside the old file may not land in the new one.

For scans, reports, and ordinary text documents that is invisible. For an interactive form it is not, so open the result before you send it on.

What the merged file carries

Page content comes across faithfully. Text stays selectable rather than being flattened into pictures, and each page keeps its own size, so a landscape scan can sit between portrait pages without either one being stretched.

Document properties do not come across, and that is deliberate. Title, author, subject, and keywords are cleared, along with the XMP metadata block that PDF readers show in a properties dialog. The merged file starts clean rather than inheriting whoever's name was on the first appendix.

A password-protected PDF cannot be opened without its password, so this tool does not pretend to merge it. It appears in the list with a lock, marked excluded, and holds no position number, while everything else still merges normally around it.

A corrupt file gets a different note, so you can tell locked from broken at a glance.

This tool works on whole files. Page-level editing is a job for Split PDF.

Nothing leaves your device

Your PDFs are not uploaded.

They are read into your browser's memory, combined there, and written back out as a download called merged.pdf. No copy is kept, and closing the tab is enough to be rid of all of it.

The page does make one request of its own. The first time you add a PDF, it fetches the pdf-lib library (about 511 KB) from noadstools.com so it can count pages and do the combining. That library is the only extra thing this tool loads, it comes from this site rather than a third-party CDN, and once it has arrived the merging needs no network.

Watch it if you like. Open DevTools on the Network tab and merge something: the library arrives once, and no PDF data goes the other way.

There is no account, no page cap, and no watermark on the result. The full source code is public on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license, and the privacy page accounts for that library and nothing besides.

Questions

Can I merge PDF files online for free without uploading them?

Yes. That is what this page is for.

No signup, no page cap, and nothing stamped on the result. Your PDFs are opened, combined, and saved entirely by your browser.

Are my PDFs uploaded to a server?

No.

The only thing this page downloads is the pdf-lib library that does the combining, and that comes from noadstools.com. Your documents stay in browser memory.

Do bookmarks and form fields survive the merge?

No. This is the real limitation of the tool.

Bookmarks, the outline, and the structure that makes a form fillable all live outside the pages, so a merge leaves them behind. Internal links to other pages may also stop working.

Text, images, and page sizes are unaffected.

Can I reorder the files before merging?

Yes, two ways.

Drag a row to a new position, or use the up and down buttons if dragging is awkward on your device. The number on each row is its place in the finished document.

Can I merge a password-protected PDF?

Not while it is locked.

An encrypted PDF cannot be read without its password, so the tool marks it password-protected and excluded, then merges the rest of your list normally. Remove the password in the app that made it, then add it here again.

Is there a limit on how many PDFs I can merge?

No fixed limit.

The practical ceiling is your device's memory, because the whole merge happens locally. If a large merge runs out of room, the tool says so rather than handing you a truncated file.

Related tools

Split PDF | extract pages or cut one PDF into pieces. Image to PDF | turn images into a PDF you can then merge. Watermark PDF | stamp text or a logo across the finished document. Sign PDF | add a signature to a page.