Cost Per Page Calculator
Printing looks cheap until you add it up. A $45 ink cartridge that prints 500 pages costs 9 cents a page in ink alone, and paper, maintenance and the printer itself push the real number higher. This cost per page calculator works out exactly what each printed page costs you, so you can compare printers, price print jobs and stop overpaying for ink.
Use the quick mode for a simple total cost divided by pages, or switch to the detailed printing mode to break the cost into ink or toner, paper, maintenance and printer depreciation, with separate black and white and colour maths and an adjustment for heavy ink coverage. If you only need to price finished copies off a copier, that is a different job: this page prices printing from your own cartridges and paper.
100 = the rated yield on the box. Use 50 for pages twice as heavy as the test page, 200 for very light pages.
Estimates from the figures you enter. Rated yields are measured on standard test pages at about 5% coverage, so real documents with graphics or photos will cost more per page unless you lower the coverage setting.
Quick Answer
Key takeaways
- Cost per page is four small numbers added together: cartridge cost divided by yield, paper cost divided by sheets, monthly maintenance divided by monthly pages, and printer price divided by lifetime pages.
- Rated yields are measured at about 5% page coverage. Real pages with logos, charts and photos use far more ink, which is why the coverage adjustment exists.
- Colour is not a small surcharge: with separate colour cartridges the ink line alone can more than double, from $0.0900 to $0.2075 in the worked example.
- A cheap printer with expensive cartridges loses to a pricier printer with high-yield cartridges surprisingly fast, and the per-page figure is how you prove it before buying.
- Quick Answer
- Quick mode or detailed mode: which one you need
- The cost per page formula, component by component
- Worked example: a small office inkjet at $0.1160 a page
- Colour printing: why the same printer costs $0.2335 a page
- What is a good cost per page?
- Cost per page is not cost per copy
- What other cost per page tools leave out
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Add This Calculator to Your Website
Quick mode or detailed mode: which one you need
Quick mode answers one question fast: given everything you spent and the pages it produced, what did a page cost? It is the right tool for checking a period you have already printed, or for any total you trust. If all you have is a lump sum and a page count for something that is not printing at all, a general cost per unit calculator does the same division.
Detailed mode is for decisions. Because it builds the page cost from cartridges, yields, paper, maintenance and the printer price, you can change one part at a time: swap in a high-yield cartridge, test a cheaper ream, or compare two printers before either is bought. It also prices a whole job, which quick mode cannot do. If a number in detailed mode surprises you, the breakdown shows which component is responsible instead of leaving you with a single unexplained total.
The cost per page formula, component by component
One page carries four costs, and each one is a simple division. Add the four results and you have the true cost per page.
Colour ink per page = (black price / black yield) + 3 \u00d7 (colour price / colour yield)
Paper per page = ream price / sheets per ream
Maintenance per page = monthly maintenance / pages printed per month
Depreciation per page = printer purchase price / expected lifetime pages
Cost per page = ink + paper + maintenance + depreciation, with the ink line multiplied by (100 / coverage setting)
The yield in the first line is the number printed on the cartridge box, and it is not a guess: mono toner yields are declared under the ISO/IEC 19752 test procedure, colour toner under ISO/IEC 19798 and ink under ISO/IEC 24711 and 24712. All of them print standard test pages at roughly 5% coverage, about a short text memo, until the cartridge empties. Manufacturers then declare yields from those tests, as in HP published yield test report for the CF289A cartridge, which declared 5,000 pages from a measured average of 5,510.
Coverage is where the box number and your office part ways. A page carrying a logo, shaded tables and a chart can easily run at 10% coverage, twice the test page, so the cartridge empties in half the rated pages and the ink cost per page doubles. The coverage setting inverts that relationship for you: leave it at 100 for test-page conditions, set it to 50 when your pages use about twice the standard ink, and the calculator multiplies the ink line by 100 / 50 = 2. Set it to 200 for very light draft pages and the ink cost halves.
Worked example: a small office inkjet at $0.1160 a page
The detailed mode is prefilled with a typical small office setup. A black cartridge costs $45 with a 500-page rated yield, paper is $5 for a 500-sheet ream, maintenance runs $10 a month against 1,000 pages a month, and the $300 printer is expected to last 50,000 pages. Pricing a 100-page job gives:
| Component | Maths | Per page |
|---|---|---|
| Ink (black) | $45 / 500 pages | $0.0900 |
| Paper | $5 / 500 sheets | $0.0100 |
| Maintenance | $10 / 1,000 pages per month | $0.0100 |
| Printer depreciation | $300 / 50,000 lifetime pages | $0.0060 |
| Total | $0.1160 per page, $11.60 for 100 pages |
Ink is 78% of this page cost, which is typical for inkjet printing and exactly why cartridge yield matters more than cartridge price. A $45 cartridge yielding 500 pages beats a $35 cartridge yielding 300 pages by a wide margin: 9.0 cents against 11.7 cents of ink per page. Run the same office through quick mode with $580 of total costs over 5,000 pages and you land on the same $0.1160, which is the cross-check the two modes are designed to give you.
Colour printing: why the same printer costs $0.2335 a page
Tick the colour box and the ink maths changes shape. Colour pages draw on four cartridges, so the tool adds the black line to three colour lines: black at $45 / 500 = $0.0900, plus each colour cartridge at $48.95 / 1,250 = $0.0392, times three colours = $0.1175 of colour ink. Ink per page becomes $0.2075, and with the same paper, maintenance and depreciation the total is $0.2335 per page, or $23.35 for the 100-page job. Colour slightly more than doubles this printer cost per page.
Black and white on this printer: $0.1160
- Ink line: $0.0900 from a single cartridge.
- Best for drafts, invoices, forms and text reports.
- Coverage mistakes are survivable: heavy pages push ink to $0.1800 at the 50 setting, for a $0.2060 total.
Colour on this printer: $0.2335
- Ink line: $0.2075 across four cartridges.
- Best reserved for client-facing pages, charts and handouts where colour earns its keep.
- One empty colour cartridge can stop printing entirely on many models, a hidden cost no per-page figure shows.
The practical rule this produces: print internal documents in black and white by default, and treat colour as a per-job decision. At office volumes the difference is not small. Ten thousand colour pages a year on these figures cost about $1,175 more than the same pages in black and white.
What is a good cost per page?
A good figure depends on the technology, because toner and ink economies are different worlds. Use these bands to sanity-check your result before acting on it:
| Printing type | Typical cost per page | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Black and white, laser (toner) | $0.01 to $0.03 | Benchmark The cheapest mainstream printing; high-yield toner sits at the low end. |
| Black and white, inkjet | $0.05 to $0.10 | Typical Fine for light use; cartridge yield decides where you land. |
| Colour, inkjet or laser | $0.15 to $0.25 | Typical Four cartridges at once; photos and heavy coverage go higher. |
| Anything well above its band | Over $0.30 colour, over $0.12 mono inkjet | Check inputs Usually a starter cartridge yield, a very low yield, or a coverage problem. |
If your result lands far outside these bands, double-check the yield you entered first. The yield quoted for the starter cartridge that ships with a printer is much lower than for a high-yield replacement, and mixing the starter yield with the replacement price quietly inflates the ink line. Laser printers almost always win on cost per page, but they cost more upfront, so inkjet can still be cheaper overall for very light use where the printer price dominates.
Cost per page is not cost per copy
These two are easy to confuse and they price different things. Cost per page, here, is a production cost: what your own printer, cartridges and paper spend to put one page on paper, built up from yields and prices. A cost per copy calculator prices finished copies instead, typically a simple total divided by copies for a copier, a copy shop bill or a print run you are charged for. Use the copy figure when you are quoted or charged per copy; use this page when you own the machine and need to know what a page truly costs you, or what to charge for it.
Print shops sit between the two: they compute their cost per page with a tool like this one, then mark it up into a per-copy or per-item price for customers. If you are setting those customer prices, cost out the finished piece with the page figures here, then check the selling unit with a cost per item calculator. One cost this tool deliberately leaves out is electricity: a printer drawing power for a few seconds per page adds a tiny fraction of a cent, and if you ever need your exact power price, a cost per kWh calculator will give it to you, but it will not change a printing decision.
What other cost per page tools leave out
Most results for this search are guides rather than working tools, and the guides mostly stop at two components: cartridge price divided by yield, plus paper. That is a fair start, but it leaves the reader doing the rest by hand. Maintenance and printer depreciation are mentioned as optional extras in prose, with no calculator that actually spreads them over pages, so the printer itself ends up treated as free, which is the oldest trick in printer pricing.
Two more gaps show up repeatedly. First, colour: several guides explain the four-cartridge formula in text but give you no tool that applies it, and none of the simple dividers adjusts for coverage at all, even though coverage is the single biggest reason real costs beat box yields, as any explanation of what 5% page coverage actually looks like makes clear. Second, job pricing: knowing a page costs $0.1160 is useful, but the question people actually bring is what a 100-page report or a 500-page run will cost, and that multiplication is built into the detailed mode here.
Frequently Asked Questions
For black and white, around $0.05 to $0.10 per page is typical for inkjet and $0.01 to $0.03 for laser toner. Colour usually lands between $0.15 and $0.25 per page. If your result is well above these ranges, check whether you entered a starter-cartridge yield or forgot the coverage adjustment.
It is printed on the cartridge box and in the printer manual, often labelled as the ISO/IEC 24711 (colour ink) or ISO/IEC 19752 (mono toner) yield. These are measured with standardised test pages at about 5% coverage, so treat them as best-case figures and use the coverage adjustment for real documents.
Rated yields assume about 5% page coverage. A page full of graphics or photos can use five times that much ink, which cuts the effective yield and raises the cost per page. Lower the coverage setting in the calculator, to 50 for pages about twice as heavy as the test page, until the estimate matches what you actually spend on cartridges.
Laser (toner) is almost always cheaper per page: toner typically costs $0.01 to $0.03 per page against $0.05 to $0.10 for inkjet printing. Laser printers cost more to buy, though, so inkjet can still win for very low volumes where the printer price dominates the per-page maths.
Yes, if you want the true cost. Spread the purchase price over the printer expected lifetime pages; manufacturers often quote a monthly duty cycle you can multiply out for an estimate. It is a small slice per page, $0.0060 in the worked example, but it is the only honest way to compare a $120 printer against a $400 one.
Multiply your cost per page by the number of pages. The detailed calculator does this automatically: enter the job size and it shows the full job price alongside the per-page figure, $11.60 for 100 pages at $0.1160 per page in the worked example.
Cost per page here is a production cost built from your own cartridges, yields, paper, maintenance and printer price. Cost per copy is the price of a finished copy, usually a total bill divided by copies from a copier or copy shop. Use cost per page when you own the printer and need the true cost of producing a page; use cost per copy when you are charged, or charging, per finished copy.
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References
- Lexmark, "Understanding Print Cartridge Page Yields: Test Standards and Factors that Impact Actual Results" - explains the ISO/IEC 19752 mono toner test at about 5% coverage and the factors that change real yields. NES Online: Understanding Print Cartridge Page Yields. Accessed October 2026.
- HP Inc., "LaserJet Enterprise M507 and MFP M528 cartridge CF289A yield test report" - declared yield of 5,000 standard pages in accordance with ISO/IEC 19752. HP: CF289A ISO/IEC 19752 Yield Test Report. Accessed October 2026.
- Lexmark, "E460 15K Toner Cartridge" product specifications - average cartridge yield of 15,000 standard pages, declared in accordance with ISO/IEC 19752. Lexmark: E460 15K Toner Cartridge. Accessed October 2026.
- iTeh Standards, "New International Standards for Digital Printing" - covers the ISO/IEC 19752:2025 revision for toner cartridge yield determination. iTeh Standards: Digital Printing Standards, November 2025. Accessed October 2026.
- Gadget Review, "Page Yield Meaning" - summary of the ISO/IEC 19752, 19798 and 24711 yield standards and the 5% coverage basis. Gadget Review: Page Yield Meaning. Accessed October 2026.
- ACO Office, "What Is 5% Page Coverage? Why It Decides How Many Pages Your Toner Cartridge Prints" - what the standard test coverage looks like against real documents. ACO Office: What Is 5% Page Coverage?. Accessed October 2026.