How to redact a court filing — properly
Court filings are public records. File an exhibit with an unredacted Social Security number and it's visible to anyone who pulls the docket. The privacy rules tell you what to redact; this page covers that plus the part filers keep getting wrong — how, so the redaction can't be lifted off with copy-paste.
What the rules typically require you to redact
In federal court, Rule 5.2 (FRCP) — with parallel rules in criminal, bankruptcy, and most state courts — requires redacting:
- Social Security / taxpayer ID numbers → last four digits only
- Birth dates → year only
- Names of minors → initials only
- Financial account numbers → last four digits only
Always check your court's local rules — many add home addresses, medical information, and their own procedures for filing unredacted versions under seal. When in doubt, ask the clerk or counsel; this page is a how-to, not legal advice.
The failure mode that makes headlines
High-profile filings have leaked names, prices, and whole paragraphs because someone drew a black rectangle over text in a PDF editor and filed it. The text was still there — reporters selected it, copied it, and published it within hours. An annotation on top of text is not a redaction. The content itself has to be destroyed before the document is filed.
Redact a filing or exhibit in three steps
- Drop the PDF on redactoronline.com. Client files never leave the machine — the entire tool runs in your browser, verifiable in the network tab, and works offline.
- Mark the protected identifiers. Search an SSN or account number once to catch every occurrence across the filing and exhibits. Left-drag across a line of text — the redaction bar snaps to the line height. Scanned exhibits: run "Scan (OCR)" first, on-device.
- Click "Redact & download". Pages are rebuilt as flattened images with the marked content destroyed at the pixel level. No text layer, no annotations, no metadata — nothing for opposing counsel or a journalist to recover.
A stack of exhibits? Drop them all at once — batch mode runs auto-detection across every file and returns a zip.
Common questions
Is image-based output acceptable for filing? The trade-off of flattening is that the output isn't text-searchable — that's precisely what makes the redaction irreversible. Most e-filing systems accept image-based PDFs; check your court's requirements (some ask for OCR'd text, in which case re-OCR the redacted output).
Partial redaction — keeping the last four digits? Mark just the leading digits by dragging across them; the box snaps to the line height and covers exactly the span you drag.
Does this remove metadata too? Yes — author, creation tool, edit history, hidden annotations, embedded scripts and attachments are all absent from the rebuilt file.