How to watermark a contract or draft before sharing it

What a watermark is actually for

The honest framing is that a watermark is a label, not a lock. It communicates status to a reader; it does not stop anyone from doing anything.

That is still valuable, because most document mishaps are not malicious. A draft contract gets forwarded, someone reads it without the covering email, and three weeks later they are surprised the terms changed. A large DRAFT across each page removes the ambiguity at the moment of reading.

Adding one

If you want a logo rather than text, use the image watermark tool instead. A transparent PNG works best; a JPEG will paint a white box over your page, because JPEG has no transparency.

1. 1Open the Watermark tool and choose your PDF.
2. 2Type the text — DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, or something specific like the recipient's name.
3. 3Set the angle, size and opacity. Diagonal at around 45 degrees is the convention.
4. 4Check the preview across several pages, then download.

Getting the opacity right

This is where most watermarks go wrong, in both directions. Too dark and the document becomes hard to read, which annoys exactly the people you need to read it carefully. Too light and it disappears when printed, which defeats the purpose.

Test by printing one page in black and white. Watermarks that look fine in colour on a screen often vanish entirely on a monochrome office printer.

Choosing the wording

Be specific. "DRAFT" is better than nothing, but "DRAFT — NOT FOR SIGNATURE" removes the exact ambiguity you are worried about. "CONFIDENTIAL" is weaker than "CONFIDENTIAL — ACME LTD INTERNAL".

For documents sent to several parties, putting the recipient's name in the watermark is quietly effective. It does not stop a leak, but it makes each copy identifiable, and people handle a document more carefully when their own name is written across it.

Keep it short. A watermark is read at a glance and at an angle; a full sentence becomes visual noise that people stop seeing after the first page.

Watermark, then sign — not the other way round

Order matters. Watermark the draft, circulate it, and when the terms are agreed, produce a clean unwatermarked version to sign. A signed document with DRAFT stamped across it is at best confusing and at worst genuinely contestable.

Keep the clean original throughout. Watermarking writes the text into the page content, so it cannot be lifted back off — the only way to get an unmarked copy is to have kept one.

This is the single most common mistake with watermarks: stamping the only copy of a document you will later need clean.

Where watermarking is genuinely useful

1. 1Contracts in negotiation, so nobody signs an intermediate version.
2. 2Tender and proposal documents shared with multiple bidders.
3. 3Design work sent for review before payment.
4. 4Internal financial reports that should not circulate outside a team.
5. 5Sample documents and templates published for reference.
6. 6Copies of identity documents, marked with their specific purpose — a widely recommended precaution, since a copy marked "for tenancy application only, 12 March" is far less useful to a fraudster than a clean one.

A note on privacy

The documents people watermark are, almost by definition, the ones they are careful about: contracts under negotiation, confidential reports, identity papers. Uploading them to a server to stamp CONFIDENTIAL on them has an obvious irony to it.

This runs entirely in your browser. The document is read on your device and the watermarked version is written on your device, with nothing transmitted — which you can verify by loading the page, disconnecting, and watermarking anyway.