How to count words in a PDF

1 min read·25 July 2026

Want to know how many words a PDF document contains? For translators, editors, and students a word count is essential. With PDFrust's word count tool you count words per page or across the entire document.

Why count words in a PDF?

Translators calculate rates per word. Editors check whether a document stays within the set limit. Students verify their thesis. In Word a word count is built-in — in PDF that feature is usually missing.

How does the word count tool work?

Upload your PDF in PDFrust's word count tool. The tool extracts text from all pages and counts the number of words, characters, and paragraphs. You see a breakdown per page so you know exactly where the content is.

Count words in PDF

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Scanned PDFs vs. searchable PDFs

A searchable PDF contains real text that can be counted directly. A scanned PDF is essentially an image — the word count tool cannot read that text. In that case first use the OCR tool to turn the scan into a searchable PDF, then count the words.

Word count after editing

Have you added text via the formFill or stamp tool? The word count tool also counts added annotations, depending on the PDF format. For the most accurate count first export the text via pdf2text.