Printer Stuck in Print Queue: How to Clear and Reset the Spooler

Your print job is trapped in the queue because the print spooler service froze or hit a corrupt data file. This stops all current and future jobs from reaching the printer.

The Windows Print Spooler manages every job sent to your printer or server. When a file turns corrupt, the spooler enters a crash loop.

The printer is not broken, and you have not lost your connection. Your computer is simply stuck trying to read a damaged file that refuses to clear on its own.

There is a version of this that catches people out, and it is worth naming because it looks like a different fault. A job marked Deleting that never disappears is not still deleting. The spooler has already given up on it and is waiting for the program that sent it to let go of the file, and if that program has closed or crashed, nothing is coming to release it. No amount of waiting resolves that state; the file has to be removed from underneath the spooler, which is what stopping the service and clearing the folder does.

A shared printer adds a second queue to think about. When a printer is attached to another computer or to a print server, there are two spoolers involved: the one on your machine and the one on the machine sharing it. Clearing yours removes your copy of the job and leaves the server's copy exactly where it was, still blocking everyone. That is why a queue can appear clear on your side and stay stuck for the office, and it is why the fix for a shared printer has to be applied where the printer actually lives.

If the spooler stops repeatedly rather than once, the queue is a symptom rather than the fault, and clearing it will keep working for a few minutes each time. That pattern points at the service itself or at a driver taking it down with it.

• A corrupt print job file blocking the queue
• The Windows Print Spooler service has stopped or crashed
• Temporary loss of USB or network communication between the PC and printer
• Outdated or conflicting printer drivers
• Stuck temporary files in the system printer spool directory

1. 1Restart the printer by turning it off and on again
2. 2Check that the USB cable or network connection is secure
3. 3Verify that the printer is set as online and not in offline mode

1. 1

   Cancel jobs from the queue

   Open the print queue from the system settings. Right click the stuck document and select Cancel. If the status changes to Deleting and stays there, proceed to the next step.

2. 2

   Restart the Print Spooler service

   Press the Windows key plus R, type services.msc, and press Enter. Scroll down to Print Spooler. Right click it and select Stop. Then right click it again and select Start.

3. 3

   Clear the spooler folder manually

   Stop the Print Spooler service using the services menu. Open File Explorer and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS. Delete all files inside this folder. Restart the Print Spooler service.

   Do not delete the PRINTERS folder itself, only the files inside it.

4. 4

   Run the built in printer troubleshooter

   Open Windows Settings, go to Update and Security or System, and select Troubleshoot. Find and run the Printer troubleshooter to automatically detect and clear stuck queues.

5. 5

   Remove and reinstall the printer

   Go to Printers and Scanners in Windows settings. Select the problem printer and click Remove Device. Restart your computer, then reinstall the printer using the latest manufacturer driver.

6. 6

   Clear it from the command line, which is the fast route

   Three lines, and they do everything the menu steps above do. Open Command Prompt as administrator: press the Windows key, type cmd, then choose Run as administrator. Then run these in order. First, net stop spooler. Second, del /Q /F /S "%systemroot%\System32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*" which empties the queue folder without touching the folder. Third, net start spooler. The queue is empty and the service is running again by the time the third line finishes.

   It must be an administrator prompt. A normal one reports access denied on the first line and the rest then appear to do nothing.

7. 7

   The PowerShell equivalent, if you prefer it

   PowerShell can remove jobs for one printer without stopping the service for everything else, which is useful on a machine with several printers. Open PowerShell as administrator and run Get-PrintJob -PrinterName "Your Printer Name" to see what is queued, then Get-PrintJob -PrinterName "Your Printer Name" | Remove-PrintJob to clear it. If a job refuses even this, it is held at the file level and the spooler has to be stopped, which is Restart-Service -Name Spooler.

8. 8

   Clear the queue where the printer actually lives

   On a shared printer, the job you can see is a copy. The original sits in the spooler on the computer or server sharing the printer, and clearing your side does nothing for anyone else. Go to that machine, or ask whoever administers it, and run the same clear there. A quick way to tell which situation you are in: if the queue empties for you and the printer still will not print for the others, the blocked job was never yours.

9. 9

   On a Mac, cancel the queue and reset it if it will not go

   Open System Settings, then Printers and Scanners, click the printer and open its queue. Delete the job that will not move, and press Resume if the queue paused itself behind it. For a job that ignores this, open Terminal and run cancel -a, which clears every queued job on the machine. If the queue is still unusable afterwards, right-click the printer list and choose Reset printing system, which removes every printer and every stored driver and lets you add the printer again clean.

   Reset printing system removes all printers on the Mac, not only the one giving trouble.

10. 10

    Deal with a job stuck on Deleting

    This one needs the service stopped, because the job is being held open by a program rather than by the spooler. Stop the spooler, either with net stop spooler or from services.msc, then delete everything inside C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS, then start the spooler again. If the file refuses to delete even with the service stopped, restart the computer and delete it before opening anything else, since nothing will have claimed it yet.

11. 11

    If it comes back within minutes, the queue is not the problem

    A queue that jams once is a stuck job. A queue that jams again every few minutes is the spooler service failing, usually taken down by a driver, and clearing the queue only buys time until the next crash. The symptom to look for is the Print Spooler service showing as stopped when you did not stop it. Where that is happening, removing the driver package for the printer that triggers it is the repair, and clearing the queue is not.

A note on the spool folder, because it is the step people are most nervous about. C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS holds nothing but jobs waiting to print, written there as they are sent and deleted once they finish. Emptying it while the spooler is stopped loses only the documents currently queued, which are the ones that were not going to print anyway. The folder itself must stay; only its contents go.

If you clear queues often, saving the three commands as a batch file turns it into one double click. Open Notepad, paste the three lines from the command line step, save it as clear-queue.bat with the file type set to All Files rather than Text Document, and run it as administrator when needed. It does exactly what the manual route does and takes a second.

One more thing worth ruling out on a printer that keeps stalling mid job: the manufacturer's status monitor. Several of them hold a job back while showing a warning about ink or paper on a window that has opened behind everything else, and from the queue that is indistinguishable from a stuck job. Checking the printer's own panel for a prompt takes a moment and occasionally explains the whole thing.