Cost per page calculator for printing

How cost per page is worked out

The cost of a printed page has three parts: the toner or ink it uses, the paper it’s printed on, and a share of what the printer itself cost you. Each one is a price divided by the number of pages it covers.

The “pages it prints” figure is the rated yield printed on the cartridge box or the manufacturer’s supplies page. A color page counts all four cartridges, because most color pages still use black for their text.

A worked example

These are the numbers the calculator starts with. They’re an illustration, not a benchmark: use your own receipts.

• Black toner: $80 ÷ 3,000 pages = $0.0267 a page.
• Color toners: three cartridges at $95 ÷ 2,300 pages, plus the black, = $0.1506 a page.
• Paper: $6.50 ÷ 500 sheets = $0.0130 a page, printed one-sided.
• Printer: a $600 printer kept for 36 months at 1,500 pages a month spreads to $0.0111 a page.

So a black & white page costs $0.0508 and a color page $0.1747. At a 60% margin, rounded up to the next 5¢, that’s $0.15 for black & white and $0.45 for color.

Margin or markup?

They’re easy to mix up. Margin is the share of the price you keep: a 60% margin on a $0.40 price means $0.24 is yours and $0.16 was cost. Markup is what you add on top of the cost: the same sale is a 150% markup on $0.16.

The calculator uses margin, so the price is cost ÷ (1 − margin). Margins are capped at 95%, because a 100% margin would need an infinite price.

What the rated yield leaves out

Cartridge yields are measured on standard test pages (ISO/IEC 19752 for black toner, ISO/IEC 19798 for color), which are lighter than many real documents. A page full of photos or solid charts can use several times the toner of a page of text. If your members print a lot of slides and photos, lower the yields a little to stay on the safe side.

A few other costs don’t fit neatly into a per-page number:

• Prints nobody collects. Pages left on the tray still used toner and paper. Hold and release stops most of them.
• Jobs that fail halfway. A jam on page 8 of 20 still used eight pages’ worth. Commontray only records what the printer reports as printed, so nobody pays for the rest, but you still paid for the supplies.
• Drums, fusers and maintenance kits. On many laser printers these are replaced every few tens of thousands of pages. Add them to the monthly cost if you buy them yourself.
• Your time. Clearing jams, ordering toner and chasing payment. That’s the part print management software is meant to remove.

From cost to a price list

Most shared spaces end up with two numbers per paper size: one for a black & white page and one for a color page. Keep them simple and round, so members can do the sum in their heads.

Two prices only feel fair if color is charged where there is color. In Commontray, color is detected page by page: a 20-page report with one chart is 19 black & white pages and one color page, even when the whole job was sent in color. And nothing is charged until the printer reports the pages as printed.