What a Print Spooler Is (And Why It's Why Nothing Is Printing)

The print spooler is a background service that holds print jobs in a queue and feeds them to the printer one at a time. Without it, every app you print from would freeze until the entire job finished printing. The spooler takes the job, saves it to disk, releases your app immediately, and handles the printer on its own schedule.

When nothing is printing but jobs keep piling up in the queue, the spooler is almost always the problem. A corrupted file or a job the printer cannot process gets stuck at the head of the line, and everything behind it waits forever. The printer itself may be on, connected, and showing no errors — the blockage is in the queue on your computer.

The Classic Symptoms

You send a print job and nothing happens. You send another. The queue shows three, then five, then eight documents waiting, but none of them move. The printer sits idle. Restarting the printer does nothing because the printer is fine — the jobs never reach it. This is a stuck spooler.

Sometimes the spooler service crashes entirely. Jobs disappear from the queue, or the queue will not open. You may see "Spooler SubSystem App has stopped working" on Windows. In that case the service needs to be restarted before anything will print.

How to Fix It on Windows

The fix is to stop the spooler service, clear the queue manually, then restart the service. Windows does not always clear stuck jobs when you delete them from the queue window, so you have to do it at the file level.

Stop the spooler service. Open the Start menu, type services.msc, and press Enter. Scroll down to Print Spooler, right-click it, and choose Stop. Alternatively, open Command Prompt as administrator and run:

net stop spooler

Delete the queued jobs. Open File Explorer and paste this path into the address bar:

C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS

Delete everything in that folder. These are the temporary files for jobs waiting in the queue. If you cannot delete a file, the spooler is still running — go back and stop it first.

Restart the spooler. Go back to services.msc, right-click Print Spooler, and choose Start. Or in Command Prompt:

net start spooler

The queue is now empty. Try printing again. If the same job causes the problem, the file itself is likely corrupted or the printer driver cannot handle it — try printing from a different app or recreating the document.

How to Fix It on macOS

macOS hides the spooler behind the CUPS printing system. The fastest fix is to reset the entire printing system, which clears all queues and removes all printers. You will need to re-add your printers afterward.

Open System Settings (or System Preferences on older versions), go to Printers & Scanners, then right-click (or Control-click) in the printer list and choose Reset printing system. Confirm the reset. This stops the spooler, deletes all jobs, and clears the printer configuration.

If you want to try clearing the queue without resetting everything, open the printer queue window from Printers & Scanners, select the stuck job, and click the X to delete it. If that does not work, open Terminal and run:

cancel -a

This cancels all jobs for all printers. If the queue still will not clear, the reset is the reliable fix.

Why the Spooler Fails

Most spooler problems come from corrupted print jobs — a PDF with broken fonts, a document with an embedded image the driver cannot parse, or a file that is simply too large for the spooler to handle. Driver bugs are the second common cause, especially after a Windows update changes something the driver was not expecting. Occasionally the spooler runs out of disk space if the spool folder fills up, though that is rare on modern systems.

The spooler also fails if the printer goes offline mid-job and the driver does not handle the error gracefully. The job sits in "printing" status forever, blocking the queue.

When the Fix Does Not Work

If clearing the queue and restarting the spooler does not help, the problem is usually the printer driver. Uninstall the printer completely, download the latest driver from the manufacturer, and reinstall. On Windows, use "Remove device" from Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Printers & scanners, then delete the driver package from Print server properties > Drivers.

If the spooler crashes every time you print, check the Windows Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc) under Windows Logs > Application for spooler errors. The error code will often point to a specific driver or a permissions problem with the spool folder.

Network printers add another layer. If the spooler is fine but jobs still do not print, the printer may be unreachable on the network, or the print server itself may have a stuck queue. Check the printer's IP address, ping it, and verify you can open its web interface.