Step-by-step guide
How to redact a pay stub
Landlords, lenders, and new employers ask for pay stubs to verify income and employment — your gross and net pay, your employer's name, and the pay period. They never need your SSN or the bank account your pay lands in.
Redact a pay stub by permanently removing your Social Security number, the direct-deposit account number, and personal deduction lines, while keeping your name, employer, pay period, and gross/net pay — those are what income verification actually checks. The removal must destroy the text; a rectangle drawn over it in a markup tool leaves your SSN in the file.
Last updated July 9, 2026
What to redact — and what to keep
Over-redacting gets the document rejected; under-redacting leaks. The split for a pay stub:
Redact
Social Security number
Auto-detected — full or last-four form
Direct-deposit account number
Auto-detected — often at the bottom, easy to miss
Deduction detail lines
Draw a box — garnishments, insurance elections, and 401(k) amounts are nobody's business
Home address & phone
Auto-detected — unless the application needs the address to match
Employee ID
Labeled IDs are auto-detected; box out bare ones
Keep visible
Your full name
Ties the stub to your application
Employer name
Proves who pays you
Pay period & pay date
Proves the stub is current
Gross and net pay
The number the verification is about
The steps
- 01
Open the pay stub in clean.ink
Go to clean.ink and drop the PDF from your payroll portal (or a scan — OCR runs on your device). Nothing is uploaded.
- 02
Review the auto-detected items
clean.ink flags your SSN, account numbers, dollar amounts, address, phone, and email. Confirm each in the review queue, and untick the pay amounts you need to keep visible.
- 03
Box out deductions and anything freeform
Draw boxes over deduction detail lines and any bare employee IDs. Each box destroys the content underneath.
- 04
Verify in the free preview
The watermarked preview shows the exact export. Confirm your income survives and your SSN doesn't.
- 05
Export and test the file
Download the clean file (one-time $6.59 unlock), then try copying text out of the redacted areas — nothing should come out.
Free on-screen preview · $6.59 once to download · the file never leaves your device
Methods that look like redaction but aren’t
A black rectangle in a markup tool
Shapes drawn over text in macOS Preview, Word, or most PDF editors change what you see, not what the file contains. Select-all and copy in the result and the “hidden” text pastes right out. If a tool doesn't say it removes content, assume it doesn't.
Highlighting text in black
Same failure, different tool: the text is still there with a dark background. PDF text extraction doesn't care about colors.
Marker, then rescan
Physical marker often fails to fully obscure printed digits — tilting the page or raising scan contrast can bring them back — and the rescan degrades quality. It can work; it's just unverifiable and ugly.
Converting to Word, deleting, re-exporting
Deleting the text genuinely removes it, but the round-trip mangles statement layouts and fonts — which is exactly what makes a document look tampered with to the person verifying it.
Whatever tool you use, run the 30-second test from Can redacted PDFs be un-redacted? on the exported file before you send it.
Questions
- What should I hide on a pay stub for a rental application?
- Hide your SSN, the direct-deposit account number, and personal deduction lines (garnishments, insurance, retirement contributions). Keep your name, employer, pay period, and gross/net pay — that's what the landlord is verifying.
- Can I hide my salary but prove employment?
- Yes — redaction is per-item. Keep your name, employer, and pay date visible and remove the amounts. clean.ink auto-detects dollar amounts, so removing every figure takes one pass through the review queue.
- My pay stub is a scan or photo — does this still work?
- Yes. clean.ink runs OCR in your browser to recover the text from scanned pay stubs, then detection works the same. The scan never leaves your device — the OCR is local too.
- Is covering my SSN with a black box in a PDF editor enough?
- Only if the tool truly removes the text. A shape drawn over the SSN in most markup tools leaves the number selectable and searchable in the file. Test any tool's output: select-all, copy, and paste into a text editor — if the SSN appears, it wasn't redacted.