How to add an electronic signature to a contract on iPhone

Contracts are the awkward case. A one-page form takes one signature and you’re done — a contract usually wants your signature at the end, your initials on every page, a date next to the signature, and sometimes your name printed underneath as well. All of that, on a phone, before the sender follows up.

The good news: your iPhone can do it without any app, and for a two-page contract that’s genuinely the fastest route. Here’s the whole thing, plus the bit most guides skip — what to look at before you put a signature anywhere.

First: the sixty-second read-before-you-sign

None of this is legal advice, and if the contract is high-stakes (equity, a personal guarantee, anything you can’t walk away from) it’s worth having someone qualified read it. But there are a few practical checks that cost you a minute and catch the ordinary problems:

Are you signing the final version? Email threads accumulate drafts. Check the file name and any date in the header against the version you actually agreed to.
Are the blanks filled? Rates, dates, notice periods, names of both parties. A blank you sign around is a blank someone else can fill in later.
Which fields are yours? Skim for every signature line, initials box, and date field with your name near it. Missing one is the most common reason a contract bounces back.
Keep your own copy. Save the signed PDF to Files or your own email before you send it. You want the version you signed, not the one you’re told you signed.

Then sign.

Option 1: iOS Markup — free, already on your phone

Markup is Apple’s built-in annotation layer, and it handles a straightforward contract fine:

Open the contract in Mail (or save it to Files first if it arrived via Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp or Slack) and tap the PDF.
Tap the pencil (Markup) icon in the top corner.
Tap + → Signature. Draw yours on the line with a finger, or pick the one you saved before. Tap Done.
Drag it onto the signature line and resize with the corner handles.
For the date and your printed name, tap + → Text, type, then drag each box into place.
For initials, tap + → Signature → Add or Remove Signature → + and draw your initials as if they were a second signature. They’ll be reusable from then on.
Tap Done, then share the signed copy back.

Where Markup is enough: a short contract with one signature, one date, and maybe one set of initials. It’s free, it’s already installed, and Apple keeps the signature on your device.

Where it gets tedious, honestly: every date is a text box you type and nudge into position, and initials on a twelve-page agreement means repeating steps 6 and the drag twelve times, with no alignment help. Markup also stores signatures but not a date or a name field — so the repetitive parts stay repetitive. If you’ve never made one at all, the three ways to create an electronic signature on iPhone covers that step on its own.

Option 2: a signature app — when the contract is long, or contracts are a habit

The case for an app isn’t the signature. It’s the other four things a contract asks for.

In Signed, you set up your signature, your initials and your printed name once — draw the signature properly on a full-width canvas, type it in a handwriting style, or have AI generate one from your name — and the date auto-fills to today. After that, a contract is: share the PDF into the app, tap each field where it belongs, export a flattened copy. Initials on every page is the part that changes most — it becomes a tap per page rather than a redraw per page.

The privacy angle worth knowing: the well-known e-sign platforms are built for the party sending a contract out — they upload the document to their cloud, track opens, and email both sides. If you’re the person receiving a contract and signing it, you never needed any of that. Signed is local-first: the contract stays on your iPhone, and the signed copy is a normal PDF you share wherever you like.

If you only want the signature image itself — to drop into a document on a laptop later — the free signature generator makes a transparent PNG in a browser with no signup.

Sending it back

Whichever route you took, reply in the same thread with the signed PDF attached, and say what you’re sending: “Signed copy attached — signature and initials on all pages, dated today.” It saves the sender a check and gives you a timestamped record in your own sent folder. If the contract came as an email attachment in the first place, signing a PDF straight from email walks the round trip end to end.

If the contract also needs the other party’s signature on the same file — a two-way agreement rather than one you’re just returning — the sequence matters, and getting it wrong leaves you with two half-signed copies. How to get two people to sign the same PDF on iPhone covers both the same-room and the email version.

Does an electronic signature count on a contract?

For everyday business paperwork — freelance agreements, NDAs, vendor terms, service contracts — sending back a PDF with your signature on it is the normal way this is done now, and most senders ask for exactly that. But it depends on the document and where you are, not on which app made the signature: some documents (wills, certain property and court filings, anything requiring a notary or a witness) have specific requirements that a signature image doesn’t meet, and some contracts specify their own signing method in the contract itself. If the sender told you how they want it signed, do that. If you’re unsure whether a PDF signature is acceptable for your particular document, it’s worth reading what’s actually being asked for — or asking the other party, who usually just says “a PDF is fine.”

Signed is a signing tool, not legal advice. What it does is remove the twenty minutes of fiddling between “I agree to this” and “it’s back in their inbox.”