Merge PDF

When you need to merge PDFs

Job applications, loan files, visa and admission forms often have a single upload slot for "supporting documents", yet the papers arrive as separate PDFs: an offer letter from HR, salary slips downloaded month by month, a bank statement from net banking. Sending them as one file in a sensible order is easier for the person reading them and is often the only way the portal accepts them. This tool stitches the pages of several PDFs together into one new PDF, file by file, in the order shown in the list.

How to merge your files

1. Drop the PDFs on the box or tap it to select them. Hold Ctrl, or Cmd on a Mac, to pick several files at once; you can also add more in a second go.
2. Wait a moment while each file is read. Its page count appears next to its name, and the total is shown below the list.
3. Arrange the files with the up and down arrows. The file at the top supplies the first pages of the result.
4. Remove anything you do not want with the bin button.
5. Press Merge PDFs. The combined file downloads, named after the first file with "-merged" added.

What happens to your pages

Each page is copied across exactly as it is: the text stays text you can select and search, images keep their resolution and nothing is re-compressed or redrawn. The pages of every file keep their own size and orientation, so an A4 letter followed by a landscape spreadsheet printout stays that way. Document-level extras are a different story. Bookmarks and the outline panel from the source files are not carried over, and fillable form fields may stop being editable in the merged copy, so fill in and save any form before merging it.

An example

Suppose a home loan application needs one PDF with your offer letter (2 pages), three months of salary slips (one 3 page PDF) and a PAN card scan (1 page). Add them in that order and the list shows 6 pages in total. After merging, pages 1 and 2 are the offer letter, pages 3 to 5 are the slips and page 6 is the PAN card. If the three files were 180 KB, 240 KB and 400 KB, expect the merged file to land close to their sum of about 820 KB, because pages are copied rather than compressed.

Password protected and damaged files

A PDF that is locked with a password, as many bank and credit card statements sent by email are, cannot be read here, and the file is marked "Could not open" with a short explanation. To include it, open it with its password in your PDF reader and save or print a copy without a password, if you are allowed to, then add that copy. A file that is damaged or is not really a PDF is marked the same way. Either way, remove it from the list and the other files can be merged.

Limits and privacy

Up to 40 files can be merged at once. Very large files, such as scanned books of several hundred MB, may be slow or run out of memory on a phone; a laptop handles them better. Everything runs inside this browser tab using the open source pdf-lib library, so your documents are never uploaded to Ur Next Door or anywhere else. Need the opposite? Use Split PDF to take pages out of a file.