Whether it's the same document printing two or three times, or an unexpected blank page tacked onto the end, this is almost always a settings issue — either in the print dialog or the queue — rather than anything wrong with the printer's hardware.
The most common cause by far: the "Copies" field in the print dialog was left set to a number other than 1 from a previous print job. Most applications remember the last-used copy count, so if you printed three copies of something last week, it may default back to 3 the next time unless you check. Always glance at this field before clicking print.
If a print job appears to hang or fail, and you resend it without clearing the original from the queue first, both can end up printing — the first one having simply been slow rather than actually failed. Open your printer's queue after sending a job and confirm only one instance of it is listed before assuming something needs to be resent.
If a document is set to print twice on two different printers — say, your actual printer and a PDF-creation virtual printer — and both entries somehow got selected or triggered, you might see what looks like a doubled print job but is actually two separate jobs to two destinations. Double-check which single printer is selected before sending the job.
This has a different, very specific common cause: a document's page count technically extends slightly beyond what appears in the last visible page — often because of margin settings, a stray extra paragraph mark, or a table/section break at the very end of the file that the application counts as its own page even though it contains nothing visible. Check your document's total page count against what you'd expect, and look at the very last page in print preview specifically, since this catches the issue before it wastes paper.
In documents with multiple sections (common in Word), a "section break" that starts a new section on an odd page can insert a blank page automatically to enforce that odd-page rule, even if you didn't intend one. This is a document formatting behavior, not a printer malfunction — check your section break settings if this happens consistently with one specific document rather than across everything you print.
See the dedicated guide for correctly clearing a jammed print queue.
See the print queue guideWindows and Mac steps to force-clear a jammed queue.
Read the article →Getting the double-sided option back, or printing manually.
Read the article →The four categories almost every printer error falls into.
Read the article →