PDF Word Count
Count words, characters and pages in a PDF, with a per-page breakdown.
About this counter
Drop a PDF, get the numbers: words, characters, sentences, pages, words per page, and an estimated reading time at an ordinary adult pace. A per-page table shows where the document is dense and where it's padding. Everything is counted on your device.
Why PDF word counts are asked for
Because money and rules attach to them: translation and proofreading are quoted per word, essay and journal submissions carry word limits, and legal filings in some courts have caps. Counting a PDF used to mean copy-pasting into a word processor and hoping the paste didn't mangle anything โ this reads the text layer directly instead. The honest caveats: a scanned PDF counts zero (images of words aren't words โ see the extractor for why), and headers, footers and page numbers that live in the text layer get counted, because to the file they are text. Reading time uses 220 words per minute; How many words is a page? covers the words-to-pages arithmetic in the other direction, and the plain word counter does live counting as you type.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the count?
Exact for the text the PDF actually contains โ the same text you'd get selecting everything. Headers, footers and page numbers count if they're real text, since no tool can reliably tell them from body text.
Why does my scanned PDF count zero words?
Scans are photographs of pages โ there's no text inside to count. Turning images into text is OCR, which needs different machinery.
How is reading time calculated?
Words รท 220 per minute โ a typical adult silent-reading pace for ordinary prose. Dense technical text reads slower; skimming reads faster.
Does my PDF get uploaded?
No โ parsing happens in your browser. Nothing about your document, including its word count, leaves your device.