How to add a watermark to a PDF free, with nothing uploaded

The short answer: six steps, no software

A watermark is words or a picture shown faintly across a page, like DRAFT or your company logo. You can add one to a PDF for free, with nothing to install:

1. Open Add Watermark in an up-to-date browser: Chrome on Android, Safari on iPhone and iPad, or any modern browser on a computer.
2. Press Choose PDF files and pick your PDF. You can pick several at once. They all get the same watermark.
3. Choose the watermark. Under Watermark, Text is already chosen, with CONFIDENTIAL typed in. Press DRAFT, COPY, SAMPLE, PAID or DO NOT COPY, or type your own words. For a logo, choose Picture or logo, then Choose a picture.
4. Set how it looks. Size and Opacity are sliders. Opacity is how solid the mark is: low lets the page show through. Then pick a colour (for words), Diagonal or Straight, Once or Repeated, and All pages or Only some.
5. Look at the cards. Every page has a small card that shows the watermark exactly where it will go. Nothing is saved yet, so change whatever you don't like.
6. Press Add watermark, then Download. The new file is named after yours, like report-watermarked.pdf. Your original is not touched.

The stamping happens on your own phone or computer. Your PDF is never uploaded, there is no sign-up, and we don't add a watermark of our own on top of yours.

One thing catches people out. The page takes PDFs to stamp and pictures to use as the watermark. If you drop a photo onto it, the photo becomes the watermark, not a page to be stamped. To stamp a photo of a document, first turn it into a PDF with JPG to PDF, then bring that PDF here.

Words or a picture? Choose by the job

Words say what a page is. A picture says whose it is. Most people need words, and a logo only for papers that carry their brand. This table shows which to pick:

This tool puts one watermark on a page at a time: words or a picture, not both in one go. If a page needs two messages, such as a logo and DRAFT, see the questions near the end.

Ready settings for common jobs

These starting points use the tool's own choices, and you can adjust each one while you watch the cards.

A draft going out for comments

Say you have a proposal that your manager must review. Press DRAFT and leave everything else as it starts: grey, diagonal, once in the middle, 60 points (a point is a small unit for the size of type, 72 to an inch), 30% opacity. Each page gets a faint grey DRAFT, and the text underneath stays easy to read. The final version comes from your original, with no mark.

A report that is private

Leave CONFIDENTIAL as it is, and choose red. Red stands out for CONFIDENTIAL and PAID, while grey is the quietest. At 60 points, the size it starts at, CONFIDENTIAL is about 16 cm wide, which crosses an A4 page at an angle. If a page is smaller than A4, lower the size a little and watch the cards.

A bill that has been paid

Press PAID, choose red and Straight, and raise the size so the word fills the middle of the page. A short word can go big: even at the largest size, 150 points, a word like COPY is about 15 cm wide, inside the 21 cm width of an A4 page. Leave the opacity near 30% so the amounts underneath stay readable. Anyone who sees the page knows the bill is settled.

A preview of notes, a design or a chapter

Press SAMPLE, choose Repeated and bring the size down to between 30 and 48 points. The page fills with rows of the word, every other row shifted along by half a step, like bricks in a wall. If you share only the first few pages as a preview, cut them out first with Split PDF, then stamp the small file.

A logo on a brochure or price list

Choose Picture or logo and pick your logo. It starts at 40% of the page's width. A logo at 20% to 30% opacity in the middle of the page is a common look for letterheads and brochures, so lower the Opacity slider to that range and check the cards.

A copy of an ID card or certificate

This one has its own article, because it needs a few extra safety steps: how to watermark an Aadhaar, PAN or ID copy before sharing it.

Getting a logo ready

• Use a PNG with a see-through background. Only the logo shows, and the see-through parts are kept in the PDF. This is often called a transparent PNG. If your logo came from a designer, ask them for the transparent PNG.
• A JPG works, but it has no see-through parts. Its background, usually white, comes along as a box around the logo. Over a plain white part of the page you won't notice it. Over text, a coloured band or a photo it shows as a pale patch. The cards show this before you save.
• You can use a PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF. A photo from an iPhone may be saved as HEIC, which doesn't open in every browser. Save a copy as PNG or JPG first.
• Crop close around the logo. The size you set is the width of the whole picture, empty edges included. A logo with wide empty margins comes out smaller than you expect.

The logo goes in the middle of each page, or repeated across it. There is no choice of a corner. Its size is a share of each page's width, so it stays in proportion even when your pages are different sizes. Very big pictures are made smaller first; the guide's part on a logo or picture explains by how much.

The picture is stored once in the PDF and used on every page. In our tests, a 14-page research paper of 992 KB, stamped with a 600 by 200 pixel PNG logo at 40% opacity, came out at 934 KB, in 0.2 seconds. A photo adds more than a logo does, because photos don't pack down as small.

Words in Hindi or another script

Typed words use a standard font with Latin letters, accents, digits and common punctuation, but not Devanagari, Tamil, Arabic or other scripts. If you type a character it can't draw, the box says which. For another script, write the words in any app that handles your language, save them as a picture, crop close around the letters, and use that picture as the watermark. Or write them in English letters, like "Sirf office ke liye". The colour choices are for typed words only: a picture keeps its own colours.

Doing it on your phone

Most PDFs people want to mark arrive on WhatsApp or email. The tool works on the phone itself, so the care is in getting the file in and out:

1. Save the PDF as a file first. On iPhone, open it in the chat or mail, tap Share and choose Save to Files. On Android, tap the download arrow on a Gmail attachment. WhatsApp keeps received documents in its own folder, which the picker doesn't always show. If you can't find the file, use Share to save it to Drive or your phone's files, then pick it from there.
2. Open Add Watermark in Chrome on Android or Safari on iPhone and iPad, and tap Choose PDF files.
3. For a logo, choose Picture or logo, then Choose a picture. Android can pick from your gallery or files. iPhone can pick from Photos or Files.
4. Set the look. On a phone, the options come first and the cards follow, two to a row. The sliders work with a finger, and the Add watermark button stays in view at the bottom of the screen.
5. Download. On Android the new PDF goes to your Downloads folder. On iPhone it usually goes to Downloads in the Files app.

Check one page at full size. The cards are small on a phone. Before you send the file, open it and look at one page properly. Our PDF Viewer opens it right in the browser if your phone has no PDF app. Then rename the file to something clear, like Rent-agreement-draft.pdf, and attach it in WhatsApp (attach, then Document) or in your email.

Other ways to watermark a PDF, and when they fit

There is more than one way to do this. Each fits a different situation:

If you are writing the document yourself in Word, its built-in Watermark option is a fine way to mark a draft before you save it as a PDF. If the PDF already exists, or came from someone else, stamping it directly is simpler. The papers people watermark are often private, such as ID copies, contracts and reports not yet public, so it is worth choosing a tool that never uploads them. Here is how that works.

After you download: check, shrink, lock

• Scroll through every page. Is the watermark on the pages you meant, and only those? With Only some, the other pages are left exactly as they were, which is what you want when the cover page stays clean.
• Nothing else changes. Text stays searchable, links and bookmarks still work, and forms keep their fields. The guide lists what stays the same.
• The file size hardly moves. In our tests, a 117-page textbook went from 5.07 MB to 5.04 MB with a repeated red DRAFT on every page, and a 42-page scan stayed at 47.8 MB. If the file is still too big for email, make it smaller with our PDF compressor.
• Should the pages be numbered too? Add Page Numbers does that, at the top or bottom of each page, in a corner or the middle.
• Sending something private? Lock it with a password using Protect PDF, and tell the password another way, such as a phone call. Some portals and offices can't read locked PDFs, so use this for sending to a person, not for uploading to a website.
• Keep your original. Add Watermark never changes it, and the watermark can't be taken off the new copy here. If you stamp the wrong words, go back to the original and do it again.

It is quick, too. On our test computer (Chromium 141, the browser Chrome is built on, on a Linux computer with 16 GB of memory), the textbook took 0.6 seconds, and all 400 pages of a 455 MB scan with a logo took 5.7 seconds. Your phone may be slower. If the page says a file is too big for the browser's memory, stamp fewer files at a time, or use a computer.

What a watermark can't do

Be clear about this before you rely on one. A watermark is a label, not a lock.

• It can be removed. Anyone with PDF editing software can select it and delete it. A repeated mark is more work to take off than one in the middle, but no watermark is impossible to remove.
• It doesn't stop anyone reading, copying or printing. The words underneath stay readable, and the mark goes along on every copy.
• Locked and signed files need care. A PDF that asks for a password to open can't be used until it is unlocked. A digitally signed PDF can be stamped, but the stamped copy no longer carries a valid signature, and the result says so.

To control who can open a file, protect it with a password. The guide's part on what a watermark can and can't do goes deeper.

Questions people ask next

Can I watermark only one page?

Yes. Under Pages, choose Only some and type the page, like 1, or a few, like 1-3, 5. The other pages stay exactly as they were. The cards say With watermark or No watermark under each page.

Can I put two watermarks on one PDF, like a logo and DRAFT?

One at a time. The tool stamps one watermark per page in each go. To use both, stamp once, download the new file, then add that file again with the other watermark. The second file's name ends in -watermarked twice, so rename it before you send it.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Yes. The watermark is drawn on top of the scanned picture, and the picture itself keeps every pixel. In our tests, a 4-page scan of 9.96 MB and a 42-page scan of 47.8 MB both came out the same size.

My file is a Word document. What do I do?

Save it as a PDF first. Word can do that, and our Word to PDF tool does it in the browser too. Then stamp the PDF.

Is there a limit on pages or file size?

We set none. The real limit is your device's memory, and phones have less than computers.