How to create an electronic signature on iPhone

“Electronic signature” and “digital signature” get used interchangeably in most search results, and for the everyday case they mean the same thing: a picture of your signature placed onto a document instead of ink on paper. Making one on an iPhone takes about two minutes, and for most people it costs nothing.

Here are the three real ways to do it, in the order you should try them.

1. iOS Markup — free, already on your phone

Your iPhone can create and store a signature without you installing anything. The trick is that it lives inside Markup, so you get to it through a document:

Open any PDF — from Mail, Files, or a photo of a document.
Tap the pencil (Markup) icon.
Tap + in the bottom corner → Signature → Add or Remove Signature → +.
Draw your signature with a finger on the line, tap Done.
It’s saved. From now on it appears in that same Signature menu on any document.

This is the honest answer for most people. If you sign something a few times a year, stop here — you now have an electronic signature on your iPhone, it’s free, and Apple keeps it on the device.

Where it runs out: drawing a signature you actually like with a fingertip on glass usually takes several attempts, and Markup gives you one signature — no separate initials for the pages that ask for them, no date field, no way to type or restyle. Every date goes in as a manual text box you nudge into position.

2. Type your name and pick a handwriting style

If your finger-drawn attempt looks nothing like your real signature, you don’t have to keep drawing. Typing your name and rendering it in a handwriting typeface produces a cleaner, more consistent mark — and it’s still a valid electronic signature in the everyday sense: it’s your name, applied by you, to show you agreed.

You can do this in a browser with our free signature generator — type your name, choose a style, download it as a transparent PNG, and drop that image onto documents. Nothing to install, and it works on desktop too.

The one thing to know: a typed-and-styled signature is more obviously not a hand-drawn one. For a school form or a vendor invoice nobody blinks. For something where a reviewer is comparing against a signature on file, draw it. If you’d rather skip the drawing entirely, here’s the full walkthrough of how to type your signature instead of drawing it on iPhone — including why the built-in signature tool won’t let you.

3. A signature app — for when signing is a recurring chore

If a document lands on you monthly or more, the bottleneck isn’t creating the signature, it’s everything around it: the initials, the dates, the multi-page contracts, the getting-it-back-to-the-sender.

That’s the gap an app fills — most visibly when you need to add an electronic signature to a contract on iPhone, where the signature is one of four things the document wants. In Signed you set your signature up once — draw it properly with a wider canvas, type it in a handwriting style, or have AI generate one from your name — and it’s saved alongside your initials and an auto-filled date. After that, any PDF is: share it into the app, tap the three things where they belong, export a flattened copy.

It’s also local-first — worth knowing because the well-known e-sign services work the opposite way. They’re built for businesses sending contracts out for signature, so the document goes up to their cloud first. If you’re just the person signing, you never needed that step.

Electronic vs digital signature — do you need to care?

Almost certainly not. In everyday use they’re the same request: put your signature on this file. There is a narrower technical meaning of “digital signature” — a cryptographic certificate that verifies who signed and proves the file wasn’t altered afterwards — used for things like notarised deeds and some corporate filings. If a document needs that, it will say so explicitly and tell you which provider to use. Nothing on this page produces one.

Which one should you make?

You sign a couple of times a year → Markup. Free, built in, done in two minutes.
You want it to look right and reuse it anywhere → generate one and save the PNG.
You sign regularly, with initials and dates → an app removes the repetitive part, not the signature part.

Whichever you pick, make it once and keep it — here’s how to save an electronic signature on iPhone so you can reuse it on every document after this one. The whole point of an electronic signature is that the second document takes ten seconds. And if you’re wondering how much weight the result carries, that’s a separate question worth reading up on — it depends on the document, not on the tool.