How to Add a Header and Footer to a PDF (Free, with Page Counters)

A contract that needs the company name on every page. A report that should say "Q3 2026 — Internal" at the top and "Page 4 of 31" at the bottom. A handout where the date has to survive printing and re-shuffling. Word and Google Docs make headers and footers trivial — but once the document is a PDF, the usual editors want a subscription for the same thing. Here's how to do it free.

The same tool covers the two classic combinations in one pass: a header carrying the company or document name, and a footer carrying the date plus a running page counter. Because both fields accept the {page} and {total} placeholders, you type the text once and the counter updates itself on every page — no manual numbering, no macros.

How to add a header and footer — step by step

🔒 pdfty.com/en/tools/header-footer

The placeholders: {page} and {total}

The tool understands exactly two placeholders:

• {page} — the current page number (1, 2, 3, …)
• {total} — the total page count of the document

So Page {page} / {total} renders as "Page 1 / 12", "Page 2 / 12" and so on. You can mix them into any sentence: Acme Corp · {page} of {total} works just as well as a bare counter.

There is no {date} placeholder — type the date yourself in whatever format you need (2026-10-02, October 2026, a revision tag like Rev. B). Since it's plain text, you fully control the format, which is often what legal and finance teams want anyway.

Header & footer vs. page numbers vs. watermark

These three tools overlap just enough to be confusing, so here's the honest breakdown:

Page numbers wins when you need the counter in a corner (bottom-right, top-left, etc.) or need numbering to start at something other than 1 — say, page 1 of the PDF should be numbered 5 because it continues another document. The header-footer tool centers its text and always counts from the first page.

Watermark is a different job entirely: big diagonal text at adjustable opacity, meant to be impossible to crop out. A footer saying "Confidential" is a label; a watermark saying "CONFIDENTIAL" is a statement.

Free alternatives, honestly compared

LibreOffice Draw (Windows/Mac/Linux, free) can open a PDF and place text boxes anywhere — but on each page by hand, which is fine for 3 pages and miserable for 60. There's no automatic page-counter field when editing a PDF this way.

Mac Preview has no header/footer feature at all. You can annotate individual pages with text boxes, again one page at a time.

CLI route: if you're comfortable in a terminal, you can generate an overlay PDF with headers via LaTeX or enscript and merge it with pdftk ... multistamp — powerful, scriptable, and roughly a 30-minute setup the first time. Reasonable for a recurring batch job, overkill for one document.

Word round-trip: convert with PDF to Word, add real headers/footers in Word, export back to PDF. This gives you fonts, logos and alignment control — but complex layouts can shift in conversion, so it's a last resort for precisely designed documents.

Practical gotchas

• Margins matter. The header sits in the top ~24 pt of the page, the footer in the bottom ~24 pt. If your document already prints edge-to-edge content there, the stamp will overlap it. Check page 1 after downloading.
• Existing page numbers don't disappear. If the document already has numbers baked in, adding a {page} counter gives you two sets. Stamp only what's missing.
• Scanned PDFs work fine — the text is stamped above the scan image. But if the scan is crooked, a perfectly horizontal footer makes that obvious; run Deskew first if it bothers you (note deskew rasterizes pages).
• Encrypted files need unlocking first — Unlock if you know the password.
• Keep it under 100 characters per field. Longer text is cut off.

Frequently asked questions

Can I put different text on the left, center and right?

The tool currently takes one header line and one footer line, both centered. For a corner-positioned counter, use Page numbers instead, which offers six positions.

Can I add a date automatically?

No — only {page} and {total} are substituted. Type the date as plain text; you control the format.

Can I skip the cover page?

Not in this tool. A workaround: Split the cover off, stamp the rest, then Merge them back. If you only need numbering to start later, Page numbers has a "start from page" option.

Will it add a watermark or change my content?

No watermark, ever — free or not. The page content is untouched; the tool only adds small gray text at the top and bottom margins.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Yes. The header and footer are real text stamped above the scanned image — they'll even be searchable, unlike the scan itself (run OCR to make the rest searchable too).

Can I change the font or size?

Not currently — it's a fixed, deliberately unobtrusive 9 pt dark-gray sans-serif. If you need branded typography, do the header in the source document before exporting to PDF.

What are the free limits?

20 MB and 50 pages per file, 10 operations a day, files deleted after 1 hour. Pro ($9/mo) removes the limits.

Is my document safe to upload?

Files transfer over HTTPS and are automatically deleted within 1 hour. For documents you can't upload anywhere, use the LibreOffice route above — slower, but fully local.