How to remove a page break in Word

Anyone who has had to work with a longer Word document will have encountered page breaks. A page break allows you to choose when a new page will begin. So what happens when you open a document and need to remove a page break in Word? The tricky part about page breaks is that by default they are invisible in the document. This can make deleting them harder than it needs to be.

Page Break vs Section Break

The next step is understanding that there are different types of page breaks and another set of break types called Section breaks. Users often confuse these and assume they are all one and the same, but they aren’t. Microsoft Word includes seven (7) different break types you can use within a document. These breaks work in different scenarios to allow you to control when a new page starts.

View page breaks

Now that you know what a page break is, and you know they are invisible by default, how can you see them to delete a page break? Microsoft Word includes a group of formatting markers which are left behind when certain options are used. These markers help to troubleshoot issues related to styling and formatting and in this case, they help us to see exactly where our page or section breaks are in a document. Let’s take a look.

1. Open Microsoft Word.
2. Open the document which contains page breaks that you want to delete.
3. Scroll to the location within the document, you’ll notice in my example below, there is a large gap between content on page 1 and 2:

4. The heading on the next page, Results for 2025, should be able to fit in that space, but a page break is forcing it to move to the top of the next page.
5. Now we need to turn on, or show the formatting markers.
6. From the Home tab, click the Show/Hide button. Alternatively you can press Ctrl + Shift + 8 on the keyboard.

7. The markers will now appear throughout the document and include markers to show the space between each word and also the paragraph markers at the end of each paragraph. What you should then also see is any page break within the document:

8. Now that you can see the page break, it is much easier to remove/delete it.

Remove a page break (delete)

1. With the page break visible, place your cursor either to the left or right of the page break line:

2. If you placed your cursor on the LEFT side of the page break, click the Delete button on the keyboard.
3. If you placed your cursor on the RIGHT side of the page break, click the Backspace button on the keyboard.
4. The page break will now be deleted from the page.

Remove multiple page breaks quickly

The technique above is nice and simple, but what if you have a very long document and you need to delete lots of page breaks, you’ll want to do that in the quickest way possible. Many of the Microsoft programs include a Find and Replace feature which allows you to search for text, numbers and different formatting or special characters, and quickly replace them.

To use Find and Replace:

1. Move the cursor to the top of the document (this makes sure that Word will search from the top down).
2. Press Ctrl + H on the keyboard to open the Find and Replace dialog box:

3. To see all the types of special characters you can search for, click the More >> button in the bottom left corner.
4. Now click the Special button and browse through the options.
5. Choose Manual Page Break from the list.
6. The characters ^m will be added to the Find what field:

7. Leave the Replace with field blank as we don’t want to replace it with anything.
8. Click Find Next.
9. Word will now highlight the first instance of a Page break.
10. Click Replace.
11. If you are confident that you want ALL page breaks removed, click Replace All. Otherwise go through one by one using the Find Next button and choose which to replace.
12. All page breaks should now be removed from the document.

So I hope this helps you to understand page breaks a little better and know how to confidently delete a page break from a Word document.

Want to learn some more useful tips? Check out some of these other posts you might find super useful:

• How to create a Table of Contents in Word
• The best keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word
• How to dictate in Word
• How to create a cover page in Word

Leave any questions below and don’t forget you can now find me on YouTube!