Before you sign
Edit a contract PDF before you sign it
A draft agreement arrived as a PDF, the rate or the notice period is wrong, and nobody is sending you the Word file. This page is about redlining a draft you are party to: change the term, make the change visible, say what you changed, and send it back the same afternoon.
- Strike the old wording, type the replacement beside it and date the change, so it reads as a negotiation and not an alteration.
- A draft under NDA stays put: the PDF is opened, amended and rewritten in your browser, never uploaded.
- Free to edit. Downloading needs a free account and starts at 99p for your first week.
Drag & drop your PDF here
Private: processed in your browser
Will this work on your file?
| Your file | Works here? | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| A draft written in Word and sent on as a PDF | Yes | The ordinary case. Clause text comes back as lines you click and retype, in the typeface the page already carries. |
| A justified body, both edges of the clause flush | Yes | It edits, but a justified block is not re-wrapped, so you work line by line and the length of your replacement matters. |
| A scan or a phone photo of the marked-up draft | After one step | Nothing in a scan is selectable until OCR has read the page. Run it through the scanned-PDF editor first. Edit Scanned PDF |
| A draft locked by their side against editing | Yes | A permissions flag is a note to readers, not a lock on the words. The draft opens here and the clause text is editable. Only change a document you are entitled to change. |
| The agreement with both signatures already on it | Not here | Do not amend an executed document. Take the change to a fresh version or a variation, and sign again. Sign PDF |
Who ends up on this page
A freelance designer with a client agreement in the inbox
The day rate in clause 4 is last year, and the project starts on Monday.
A small business owner taking on a supplier agreement
Their template names a trading address that has not existed since the move.
A procurement coordinator returning the draft a third time
The notice period keeps coming back at 90 days and nobody is tracking why.
A contractor about to sign a short statement of work
It still says 12 weeks and the kick-off slipped a month.
How to do it
- 1
Open the draft and find the clause
Drop the PDF into the editor above, then use the find bar to reach the term in question: the fee, the notice period or a party name.
- 2
Click the wording with Select and retype the term
Select, click the line, type the new figure or date over the old one. If your wording runs longer, the lines below move down.
- 3
Mark the change with Line and Add Text
To show the change rather than make it quietly, leave the original words, draw a Line across them at the thinnest width, and add the replacement beside them with Add Text.
- 4
Date the amendment, then export and return it
Add Text at the foot of the clause with your initials and the date, or a row if the draft carries a schedule of amendments. Then export it.
What you can change
- Change a day rate of £450 to £525 in clause 4.1 and again in the fee schedule
- Turn a 30 day notice period into 60 days everywhere it appears, definitions included
- Move a delivery window from 12 weeks to 16 and correct the completion date under it
- Fix a counterparty written "Ltd" where the registered name ends in "Limited"
- Swap a trading address for the registered office in the parties block on page 1
- Add a 14-word carve-out to an exclusivity clause, then check what it pushed to the next page
- Strike a 60 day payment term, write 30 beside it and initial the margin
Why the usual routes break this file
Convert it to Word and edit there
The conversion re-flows the agreement. Numbering shifts, schedule tables lose their column widths, and you spend the afternoon checking what the converter moved rather than what you meant to change.
Ask the other side for the editable version
Sometimes it works, at the cost of a day or two. Often the draft came out of a template their drafter will not release, and the PDF is the draft.
Accept their wording and argue it at renewal
The rate you did not want is the rate on every invoice for the whole term, and the next draft is drawn from this one. Nothing about it gets easier for being deferred twelve months.
Describe the change in the covering email instead
The amendment lives in a thread, not in the document. The next draft comes back without it and you are arguing about what was agreed on the 12th.
What this will not do
- Editing is free. Downloading the amended draft needs a free account, 99p for your first week and then a plan from £11.99 a year.
- Nothing renumbers. Insert a sub-clause and the one below is still called 4.3, so renumber by hand and check the cross references.
- A long insertion pushes the text below it down its column, and when the page fills, the spill goes onto a new page inserted straight after the one it came from. Read the pages after your edit before you send it.
- Nothing here tells you whether your amendment is effective, or whether the clause you are carving out is the one that matters.
Where this stops being a formatting question
To be plain about the line: this is for amending a draft before it is signed and issued. If the agreement has already been executed, editing the PDF is not the answer. Go back to the last clean version and sign a new one, or agree a short variation that sits alongside the original.
Questions people ask
Can you tell me whether my amendment is enforceable?
No, and be wary of anything that says it can. We change what the page says. Whether a struck rate binds the other side depends on what they accept and on how the agreement handles variations, which is a question for a solicitor rather than for an editor. What this page does is make your change legible and dated, so nobody can argue later about what you returned.
The agreement is already signed. Can I just correct the date in the PDF?
No. Once both parties have signed, the file is the record of what they signed, and quietly changing it is not a formatting job: the route is a fresh version, or a short variation alongside the original. Where the error is a genuine typo rather than a term, raise it in writing and let the other side confirm the reading, so the correction lives in a thread both of you can produce later and the executed PDF stays exactly as it was signed.
Why strike the old wording instead of simply replacing it?
Because a silent swap reads as an alteration and a marked one reads as a negotiation. Their reviewer compares your return against the copy they sent either way, and an unannounced change costs more goodwill than it was worth. Leave the original words, put a thin line through them, write the replacement alongside, and date a note at the end of the clause.
I added a sentence and the clauses below moved down a page. Is that a problem?
It is worth two minutes of checking. When the page fills, the spill carries onto the following page, or onto a new page inserted straight after the one it came from, and nothing is renumbered on the way. Before exporting, read the pages after your edit, look for a heading stranded from its body, and check any reference naming a page number, because that is where a reviewer will notice first.
They want the change in Word. Can you give me a Word file?
We edit the PDF and hand back a PDF, so if the other side insists on a tracked Word document you will have to ask them for their own source. What usually settles it: return the marked PDF, and in the covering email quote the clause number with the old and the new wording in full. Their drafter pastes two lines into the master copy and the change is then in both files.
The draft is under NDA. Does it leave my machine?
The file does not. It is read, amended and rewritten by your own browser, so the pages of the agreement are never sent to us and nothing of the draft is stored anywhere. The honest carve-out: when you are signed in and press Export, we check whether your account may download. That request carries your account, not your document. Alongside it our analytics records that an export started and finished, as counts with no file name and no page content.
Open the draft, change the term, mark what you changed and date it, then send it back this afternoon instead of waiting two days for a Word file that may never arrive. The editor is above: drop the PDF straight in.
Open your PDF