Why labels print off center, and how to fix it

First, work out which problem you have

Print one page on plain paper, hold it over an unused label sheet against a window, and look at the top row and the bottom row.

Cause 1: the page was scaled

This is the most common one and the easiest to miss. Print dialogs default to "Fit to page", "Shrink oversized pages" or "Scale to fit" — designed to stop documents being clipped, and exactly wrong for labels. It typically shrinks the page to 94–97%.

At 96%, the top of the page is off by almost nothing, so the first row looks perfect. By the bottom of an 11 in sheet the error is about 11 mm. That is why people describe it as "the last row is wrong" and go looking for a template problem.

To confirm it worked, print the alignment test and measure the line across the top. It is drawn exactly 7 inches long on a US Letter sheet, and 180 mm on an A4 one. If your ruler says less, the page is still being scaled.

Cause 2: your printer feeds the page a little off

Every printer grips the paper with rollers and starts printing a fixed distance from where it thinks the edge is. That estimate is out by up to about 2 mm on consumer printers, and it differs between the main tray and the manual feed on the same machine. On a plain document you would never notice. On a 1 in label with 3 mm of clear space, you notice immediately.

The tell is that the error is constant: every label on the sheet is wrong by the same amount, in the same direction, top row and bottom row alike.

Measure from the same tray you will actually print labels from, and keep the correction with that tray in mind. If you later switch from the manual feed to the main tray, run the test again.

Cause 3: the wrong sheet, or the wrong paper

Label pack numbers are confusing on purpose: 5160, 8160, 5260 and 5960 are all the same 30-per-sheet layout, sold for different printers and pack sizes. On A4 sheets the L prefix is laser and J is inkjet, so L7160 and J8160 are also the same sheet. Every number that fits a template is listed on its page, so check yours is there — or type it into the pack-number box and it will find the right one.

Paper size is the other trap, and the one that catches people who found a template in the wrong country. A4 is 8.27 × 11.69 in and US Letter is 8.5 × 11 in. Send a Letter page to a printer loaded with A4 and the driver will usually scale it to fit, which puts you straight back into cause 1 — and if it does not scale it, the right-hand column is clipped instead.

Both paper sizes are supported here. The 5000-series numbers are US Letter; the L and J numbers are A4. Pick the one that matches the pack in your hand, not the one that matches the number you half-remember.

Things that help before you print anything

• Test on plain paper. A sheet of paper costs nothing; a sheet of labels costs about 30 cents.
• Turn on "Print label outlines" in the tool for that test print, so you can see the label edges on paper.
• Use the manual or bypass tray, one sheet at a time. Label sheets are thicker than paper and skew more easily in a stack.
• Match the sheet to the printer. Laser sheets in a laser printer, inkjet sheets in an inkjet. The wrong adhesive can melt inside a fuser.
• Never re-feed a part-used sheet through a laser printer. An exposed edge can lift and peel off inside the machine.
• Print the whole sheet in one job. Feeding the same sheet twice means two chances for the feed offset to differ.

When it really is the template

It happens. Two sources can disagree about a margin by 1/32 in, and a template built from the wrong one is wrong everywhere on the sheet — which looks exactly like a printer offset. The way to tell them apart is a second printer: a feed offset changes between printers, a template error does not.

If a template here is wrong, please say so and include the sheet number and what you measured. The geometry for these layouts is checked against physical sheets, and a real measurement is more useful than any published specification.