w:pageBreakBefore (Page Break Before)

Forces a page break immediately before this paragraph.

Parent elements

w:pPr

Description

w:pageBreakBefore forces a page break immediately before the paragraph, regardless of how much space remains on the current page. It is an on/off toggle property defined in ECMA-376 Part 1 §17.3.1.23.

This is semantically different from inserting an explicit w:br with w:type="page" at the end of the preceding paragraph: w:pageBreakBefore is a property of the target paragraph itself, so it survives editing (reordering, style changes) more reliably.

Attributes

Attribute	Type	Possible Values	Description
`w:val`	`ST_OnOff`	`true`, `1`, `on` (enabled) / `false`, `0`, `off` (disabled). Omitting the attribute is equivalent to `true`.	Toggles forced page break on or off.

Examples

<w:pPr>
  <w:pageBreakBefore/>
</w:pPr>

new ParagraphProperties(
  new PageBreakBefore());

Notes

Common on top-level heading styles (e.g. “Heading 1”) so each major section starts on a new page.
On the first paragraph of a section, the page break is already implied by the section boundary, so this property has no additional effect.