How to Blur a Bank Statement Before You Share It

They asked for proof of income. You sent three months of your life.

A landlord wants to see that you can cover the rent. A lender wants to see that money arrives regularly. An accountant wants to check one payment against their records. All three ask for the same thing: send us your recent statements.

What they actually need out of that document is small. That the account is yours. That money comes in, and roughly when. That there is something left at the end of the month.

What you send is everything you did for three months. Where you were treated, and for what. What you pay your solicitor. Which subscriptions you have been meaning to cancel. Where you eat, how often, and how much of your income goes on it. Every transfer to and from people whose names are printed in the description line — people who never agreed to be part of your rental application. Plus your account number and sort code, which together are most of what somebody needs to set up a payment.

Nobody asked for any of that. It comes attached because a statement arrives in one piece, and the piece is much larger than the question.

Look at where the surviving parts sit: your name and the period at the very top, two credits buried in the middle of a long list, the closing balance at the bottom. Four spots, none of them next to each other, with everything nobody asked about in between.

What to hide — and what has to stay

Most guides on this stop at "hide your account number". The harder half of the question is what you must leave alone, because a statement that has been cleaned too enthusiastically stops proving anything and gets sent straight back.

Hide:

• The account number. Leave the last four digits — enough to match the document to you without handing over the whole thing.
• The sort code, or routing number. On its own it is public information about a branch; next to your account number it is half of a payment instruction.
• Individual transactions that are nobody else's business. Medical payments, subscriptions, shops, private transfers.
• Other people's names in the description line. This one gets overlooked constantly. A transfer to a person prints their name on your statement, and they never agreed to appear in your rental application.

Leave visible:

• Your own name. Without it the document proves nothing at all.
• The bank's name and the statement period, so it is visibly recent and visibly real.
• The credits that demonstrate income — the entire point of sending it.
• The closing balance.

The trap in the running-balance column

Here is the part almost nobody thinks of, and it quietly undoes careful work.

Most statements carry a running balance down the right-hand side — the total after every transaction. If you cover a transaction but leave that column alone, the amount you hid is still there: it is the difference between the two balances either side of it. Anyone who cares can do the subtraction in their head.

So if you are hiding transactions, hide the running balance beside them as well. The closing balance at the bottom is fine to keep — it is a single figure with nothing to subtract it from.

Why you can't just crop it

Look at those two lists again. Your name and the bank are at the top of the page. The period is at the top. The credits proving income are in the middle of the table with dozens of rows around them. The balance is at the bottom. What has to go is precisely what lies between the parts that stay.

So what you need to show is scattered across the whole page — and so is what you need to remove. Cropping cannot solve that in principle. You would have to send three or four separate scraps, and at that point the document stops being a document: nobody can see that the pieces came off one page, and that is exactly what you were being asked to prove.

The black box trick doesn't work in a PDF

The most common advice online is to open the PDF and cover the extra parts with a black rectangle.

Don't. That rectangle is a shape drawn on top of the text. The text itself has not gone anywhere: it is still in the file, and it comes straight back out by selecting and copying. You see a black bar. The recipient sees a black bar. Underneath it sits everything you thought you had removed.

Genuine redaction — the kind that destroys the text beneath — exists in the paid Acrobat Pro. The free Acrobat Reader does not have it. It has drawing, which is not the same thing and never has been.

Which is why a screenshot is safer here than an edited PDF: an image has no separate text layer. What you hid does not exist in the file any more — it has been replaced by pixels, not covered by them.

The free way: what Windows can do on its own

On Windows 11 (build 24H2 and later) the Snipping Tool can strip out some sensitive details by itself, and hardly anyone knows it is there:

1. Open the statement on screen, then open the Snipping Tool from the Start menu.
2. Click New and drag across the part of the screen you want. The capture opens in the Snipping Tool window, ready to work on.
3. Click Scan Text and let it read the text in the image.
4. Click Quick Redact. It blacks out what it recognises as sensitive — email addresses, phone numbers, card numbers.
5. Anything it missed: select the text by hand and choose Redact.

This is free, it works, and if all you needed was to knock out a card number it is the whole job. If that is your situation, you can stop reading here.

Where the automatic tools stop

Quick Redact will find a card number — it has a recognisable shape. It may well find an account number, for the same reason.

What it will never find is the row you don't want to show. There is nothing technically sensitive in it: an ordinary date, an ordinary amount, an ordinary payee. What makes it sensitive is context that exists only in your head. The software has no way to know that this clinic, this solicitor, this transfer to a family member is the line that matters.

And across three months of statements there are not three such rows. There are thirty.

The other way round: hide the page, reveal the four things they asked for

Turn the job around. Instead of hunting through thirty rows for the ones to cover, cover the whole page at once and reveal only what was asked for.

You capture the statement and the entire page comes up already hidden. Then you brush over four things: your name and the period at the top, the two credits, the closing balance. Four strokes instead of thirty erasures — and, more to the point, the thirty rows you never touched were never visible in the first place.

The difference isn't speed, it is which mistake is possible. Working the usual way, the mistake is "I missed one", and it is a silent one: you find out after you have sent it. Turned around, missing something isn't a thing that can happen — you are not covering the extra, you are simply not revealing it. And if you do slip, you see it immediately, because the thing you needed won't be there.

Worth adding without making a fuss of it: none of this leaves your computer. No cloud, no account, no upload. Uploading your bank statement to a free online blur tool is, when you think about it for a second, a strange way to protect it.

Can what you hid be recovered?

A fair question, and the honest answer is: try it yourself. Blur something and then see what you can get back with whatever you find online. No ordinary web tool will undo it.

What is hidden is baked into the pixels. It is not a layer sitting on top waiting to be peeled away, and there is no original tucked inside the file — unlike that black box on a PDF, which comes off in seconds.

Someone who would genuinely set out to reconstruct an image is someone who came for that specifically. If a person has targeted you to that degree, a statement you emailed is not your weakest point.

Even so, if the document is going somewhere you don't control, BlurSnap has a frosted glass mode: hidden areas are replaced with a plain sheet rather than blurred, so nothing left in the file is derived from what was hidden at all.

A quick check before you send

• account number — last four digits only;
• sort code or routing number;
• the running balance beside anything you covered;
• other people's names in transfer descriptions;
• page two — statements are rarely one page, and the second one gets forgotten;
• the file name, if it is something like statement-aug-8842.pdf;
• your home address, if the bank prints it in the header.

Why I built this

I built this for myself, out of one specific frustration.

Before it existed, the only way to show three separate parts of one page was to cut the picture into three small pieces. The moment you do that, the picture stops meaning anything: the other person gets a handful of fragments and can't tell how they fit together, or even that they came off the same page. Then come the follow-up questions, and you end up explaining in writing what the image was supposed to show on its own.

A statement is the clearest example of that there is. Everything that proves your point sits at opposite ends of the page, and everything in between is private.

More about why I built BlurSnap →

Related: hiding client names in a screenshot.