List of Free Windows Zip File Programs

There several completely free zip file programs you can use to extract zip files on Windows without having to buy any software.
Here are the best free zip file programs:

7-Zip

7-Zip is an open source file archiver designed originally for Microsoft Windows. 7-Zip operates primarily with the 7z archive format, as well as being able to read and write to several other archive formats. A user can use the command line interface, graphical user interface, or Windows shell integration. 7-Zip began in 2000 and is actively developed by Igor Pavlov. It is related to a cross-platform port, p7zip.

WinUHA

WinUHA is a high-compression 386+ DOS and Windows file archiver with multimedia support. It is written by Uwe Herklotz and is available in binary form, free only for non-commercial use.
Memory requirements depend on the compression method used (e.g., -mz needs less than -mx). Comparisons between WinRAR and UHarc generally show smaller filesizes with UHarc but a relatively substantial increase in decompression time (but much faster than PAQAR4, etc).
The latest beta is 0.6b (01 Oct 2005), but since 0.6a it has completely replaced the 0.4 and older archive headers and is not backwards compatible. There is a known limitation that archives must be smaller than a total of two gigabytes unpacked size, although there are some reports that it is possible to compress a 6gb unpacked sized archive.

PeaZip

PeaZip is a file manager and file archiver for Microsoft Windows and Linux. It supports its native PEA archive format (featuring compression, multi volume split and flexible authenticated encryption and integrity check schemes) and other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats.
The program features an archive browser interface with search and history features for intuitive navigation in archive's content, and allows to apply fine-grained multiple exclusion and inclusion filter rules to the archive; a flat browsing mode is possible as alternative archive browsing method.
PeaZip allows users to run extracting and archiving operations automatically using command-line generated exporting the job defined in the GUI front-end. It can also create, edit and restore an archive's layout for speeding up archiving or backup operation's definition.
Other notable features of the program includes file splitting and joining, secure file deletion, byte-to-byte file comparison, archive encryption, checksum/hash files, system benchmarking, random passwords/keyfiles generation, and integration in the Windows Explorer context menu. In addition, the program's user interface (including icons and color scheme) can be customized.

FilZip

Filzip is a freeware file archiver program for the Microsoft Windows platform.
It was written by Philipp Engel. While free, the author does request donations to help the cost of development and reward him for his work. Filzip supports seven different archive formats, allowing the user to add and extract files from the archives. These include ZIP, BH, CAB, JAR, LHA (LZH), TAR, and gzip. A handful of other formats are supported for extraction only, including ACE, ARC, ARJ, RAR, and ZOO.