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Page break in Word, and the shortcut that lives on another page

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 24 September 2026 · 13 min read

A page break in Word is a mark you put in the text that says: the next page starts here. Put the cursor where one page should end, then Insert and Page Break on Windows, or Layout and Breaks and Page on a Mac. The keys are Ctrl and Enter, or Command and Return.

1. Put the cursor where one page should end and the next begin. Not on the page you want to move: at the point in the text the move should happen. Microsoft’s wording is exactly that — “put your cursor where you want one page to end and the next to begin”.
2. On Windows, go to Insert and choose Page Break.
3. On a Mac, go to Layout, then Breaks, then Page. A different tab and a different menu from the Windows route, for the same result. Microsoft’s shorter page for the Windows editions, “Insert a page break”, does not carry this route at all.
4. Or press the keys instead. Ctrl + Enter on Windows, Command + Return on a Mac. Same break, no menu.
5. Turn on Home › Show/Hide ¶ to see what you just did. The break appears as a dotted line labelled Page Break. If you ever need to remove it, that label is the thing you select, and if a break has left a blank page behind, deleting a page in Word is where that case is worked through.

The reason to use one at all is that it survives editing. The alternative is pressing Return until the text falls onto the next page, and that works until somebody adds a sentence higher up — at which point every blank line moves, and the heading that was at the top of a page is now three lines down it. A break is anchored to a point in the text rather than to a count of empty lines, so it moves with the sentence it follows. La Trobe University’s guide for research students puts the same thing in one line: a page break lets you start a new page “without needing to fill the previous page with text”.

A page break and a section break are not two strengths of the same thing. A page break moves the text. A section break makes what comes after it a separate part of the document, which can then have its own margins, its own columns, its own headers and its own page numbering. La Trobe’s guide draws the line in one sentence — a page break, “unlike a section break”, “does not allow for different formatting to be applied”. So the test is not how big the change is. It is whether anything about the page itself has to change. If the answer is only “the text should start further down”, a page break is the whole answer.

Microsoft publishes four kinds of section break, and the names describe what they do: Next Page starts the new section on the following page, Continuous starts it on the same page, and Even Page and Odd Page start it on the next even- or odd-numbered page. The last two exist for printing and binding, and Microsoft gives the worked example: put an Odd Page break at the end of page 3 and the next section starts on page 5. That is the behaviour that surprises people the first time, and it is deliberate. Where this matters most in practice is page numbering: in La Trobe’s example the numbers run in Roman numerals until the first chapter and in Arabic after it, and each style belongs to its own section.

One thing the browser version cannot do. Word for the web will insert a page break, and Microsoft says plainly that it “can’t add section breaks yet”, with the suggested way round being the Open in Word command. That is worth knowing before you plan a document that needs two columns in the middle of it and nowhere else, because that particular job is a section break and not a page break.

If the break is not doing what you expected, turn the marks on before changing anything. Home and Show/Hide puts a dotted line labelled Page Break where each one sits, as in Microsoft’s own example, and the same switch shows the rest of the hidden formatting. Microsoft attaches the tip to its shorter Windows page, “Insert a page break”: if Word “puts a new page in your document unexpectedly, it might be because of a page break”, and the way to see them is that switch. Almost every question about a page that will not behave is answered by two minutes with the marks visible, and it is the same two minutes that answers a margin that looks wrong.

The routes, the keys, the four section-break names and the note about the web version are quoted from Microsoft’s own documentation, read on 24 September 2026 and listed below. The reading of why the shortcut is hard to find, and the test for choosing between the two kinds of break, are ours.

Not covered here. It does not cover removing a break. Microsoft’s tip is the place to start: turn on Home › Show/Hide to see the breaks “so that you can select and delete them”.

It does not cover Google Docs.

And it does not recommend anything to install. Every route here is a menu or two keys in the program the document is already open in. What holds instead is simple: the menu routes and the keys are quoted from Microsoft’s own Word pages, with the date each was read.