How to split a PDF

Pick the mode that matches your goal

The Split PDF tool offers two distinct behaviours, and choosing the right one first saves a round of undoing:

Walking through a split

1. Open the Split PDF tool in your browser.
2. Select or drag in the PDF you want to break up (files up to 100 MB are supported).
3. Choose a mode: extract a range, or split every page.
4. If you chose extract, type the pages you want in the box.
5. Press Split PDF and save the resulting file: a single PDF, or a ZIP if you split every page.

Writing a page range the tool understands

The range box reads two symbols: commas separate individual picks, and hyphens describe a continuous run. A few worked examples:

• 1-3 gathers pages 1, 2 and 3.
• 1-3, 5 gathers pages 1, 2, 3 and 5, skipping 4.
• 2, 4, 6 takes only those three individual sheets.
• 8-10 pulls a run from deeper in the document.

Page numbers refer to physical sheets counted from the front of the file (the first page is 1 even if the printed folio says something else), so cross-check against your viewer's "page X of Y" counter if the document numbers itself unusually.

How the split is built under the hood

Splitting never rasterises or re-encodes your pages. In extract mode the chosen page objects are copied verbatim into one fresh PDF; in split-every-page mode the tool creates a separate single-page document for each sheet and packs them into a ZIP so a 40-page scan does not rain 40 downloads on you. Either way the pages arrive byte-for-byte as they were: searchable text, embedded fonts, and image resolution all survive. Bookmarks and form logic that lived at the whole-document level are the one thing a slice cannot carry, since they belong to the parent file rather than the individual page.

Two everyday splitting jobs

A landlord who scans a stack of signed leases in one pass ends up with a single fat PDF where tenants' contracts run back to back. Split-every-page mode turns that into one file per sheet, ready to be renamed and filed against each tenant's record, with no manual page-picking required. At the other end of the scale, a consultant sending a client just the two-page executive summary of a 90-page study uses extract mode with a range like 1-2, producing a tidy deliverable that omits the confidential appendices entirely. The same tool covers both because the only real difference is whether you want one slice or many.

Split, extract, or delete: telling them apart

Three tools sit close together, so choose by what you want to end up holding:

• Need a handful of pages as one new file? Split's extract mode or the dedicated Extract Pages tool both do it.
• Want to discard a few pages and keep everything else? Reach for Delete Pages instead.
• Need every page as its own file? Only split-every-page produces that.

Your document stays on your machine

Because the split is computed inside the browser tab, the PDF you feed in is never transmitted to us or anyone else; it is read locally, cut locally, and returned as a download. That matters most for the very files people split, like a contract where only one clause page should leave the building. The deeper reasoning is in our explainer on whether online PDF tools are safe.

Common questions about splitting

What is the largest file I can split? Up to 100 MB. Bigger documents work too, but on older phones the in-browser processing may take a little longer.

Why did I get a ZIP instead of a PDF? That is split-every-page mode doing its job: each page becomes its own file, so they travel together in one archive.

Can I put the pieces back together later? Yes. Feed the parts into Merge PDF, arrange them, and you have a single document again.

Does splitting lower the quality? No. Pages are copied exactly, so nothing is compressed or re-rendered in the process.

Related tools

Splitting often leads to a follow-up: Merge PDF to recombine, Extract Pages when one clean file is all you need, or Delete Pages to trim from the original instead.