How to Restart the Print Spooler When It's Stuck (Windows, Mac, and What Actually Causes It)

You hit print, nothing happens, and either your document is just sitting in the queue with a little spinning icon or Windows tells you the printer is offline even though it isn't. Nine times out of ten, this is the print spooler — the little Windows service that hands documents off to your printer — getting itself wedged. It's been doing this since Windows XP and Microsoft has never really fixed it.

Here's how to clear it out, and how to keep it from happening again. None of this requires installing anything.

What the Print Spooler Actually Does

The spooler (its real service name is Print Spooler on Windows and cupsd on Mac and Linux) is the middleman between your document and your printer. When you hit print, Windows turns your document into a print file, stuffs it into a folder, and tells the spooler service to feed those files to the printer one at a time. When a file gets corrupted or the printer hangs up halfway through, the spooler can't move on. Every other job piles up behind it. That's the queue you see growing.

The Fix That Works 90% of the Time (Windows)

Open Services. Press Windows key + R, type services.msc, hit Enter. Scroll to Print Spooler, right-click, choose Stop.

Now open File Explorer and paste this into the address bar: C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS. Delete everything in that folder. (You're not deleting a printer — you're deleting stuck print jobs. Windows will rebuild it.)

Go back to Services, right-click Print Spooler again, choose Start. Try printing.

If that fixes it, you can stop reading. If it comes back tomorrow, keep going.

If the Spooler Crashes Again Within a Day

A repeat-offender spooler usually means one of three things:

• A corrupt printer driver. Uninstall the printer from Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Printers & scanners. Then go to HP, Brother, Canon, or Epson and download the latest driver for your exact model. Don't use the generic Windows driver if you can avoid it — that's the source of half the spooler crashes I see.
• A stuck job from a network printer that's now offline. If you sometimes print to a printer at the office or a shared one at home, and that printer is currently off, the spooler will keep choking on jobs aimed at it. Delete those queued jobs or temporarily remove that printer from your list.
• An old job from a PDF or oversized image. Huge files — scanned PDFs, multi-page images at 600 DPI — sometimes push the spooler past what it can handle on older PCs. Try printing the same document at lower quality or splitting it.

The Mac Version of This Fix

Mac doesn't call it the spooler, but the same thing happens with CUPS. Open System Settings > Printers & Scanners. Click your printer, then Open Print Queue. Cancel every job. Then right-click (or two-finger click) anywhere in the printer list and choose Reset printing system. That nukes every printer and every queued job. You'll need to re-add your printer, but it almost always clears the problem.

Apple has a decent support page on this if you want their version of the steps.

One More Thing — the Stuck-on-Pause Trap

If your queue isn't growing but nothing prints, check whether the queue is paused. Open the printer queue, click Printer in the menu bar, and make sure Pause Printing and Use Printer Offline are both unchecked. Windows loves to silently flip these on after a sleep/wake cycle, and people spend hours trying to fix a "broken" printer that just needs that one click.

While You're Here

If the spooler keeps acting up and you're also seeing faded prints or weird color issues, the spooler isn't usually the cause — that's a cartridge problem. We have a guide on what causes faded and streaky prints and another on how to clean a printhead properly. If you're due for a refill while you're troubleshooting, our HP ink cartridges, Canon ink, and Brother toner collections are all compatible cartridges at a fraction of the OEM price.

The Bottom Line

If the spooler hangs once, clear it and move on. If it hangs twice in a week, the driver is the problem — reinstall it from the manufacturer, not from Windows. Skip the registry edits and the third-party "spooler fixer" tools floating around online. None of it is necessary.