Printing Cost Per Page Calculator

The three lines of math

Everything above reduces to this: cartridge price ÷ effective yield = ink or toner per page; paper per sheet ÷ pages per sheet = paper per page; add them and you have cost per page. Effective yield is where the honest work is: the rated yield on the box is measured at the ISO standard ~5% coverage per channel, and the calculator rescales it to whatever your pages actually cover. A color page runs the same arithmetic twice — once on the black channel, once on the three-channel color set — then paper goes on top, halved if you duplex.

Coverage: the model and its caveat, printed plainly

The coverage field treats ink use as linear: a page that covers twice the ISO-test area consumes twice the cartridge fraction, so a 300-page cartridge yields ~150 pages at 10% or ~30 pages at 50%. That’s a good model for toner, and a deliberately conservative one for inkjets, which also burn ink on printhead cleaning whether the page is sparse or dense — real inkjet yields at high coverage tend to land 10–30% under the linear estimate. Use the adjusted yield for ranking printers and budgeting cartridges, not for promising a client what their invoice will be. The full story is in what ISO page yield actually measures.

Reading the results

Each profile reports mono (black channel + paper), color (black + the full color set + paper), and blended — mono and color weighted by your color share, which is what a mixed monthly pile really costs. Per doc multiplies the blend by your pages-per-document; per month by your volume; TCO adds the printer price to the pages over your whole horizon — the only column where sticker shock is priced in.

The breakeven line

The chart solves printerA + cppA × pages = printerB + cppB × pages for pages-per-month over your horizon. Cheap printers with expensive ink cross expensive printers with cheap toner surprisingly early — with the defaults, around two dozen pages a month. Below the crossover the cheap box is genuinely cheaper; above it, you are paying rent on the cartridge aisle. Edge cases are handled honestly: when one side is cheaper to buy and per page, the calculator says “wins at every volume” instead of inventing a crossing. The long version is in inkjet vs laser economics.

One breath on filament

A spool is just a cartridge with worse marketing: cost/gram = spool price ÷ net grams, and your slicer’s meter estimate converts via cross-section × density — 1.75 mm PLA is ≈3.0 g/m, 2.85 mm ≈7.9 g/m. The waste margin is the part everyone forgets: skirt, priming, supports and the print that fails at hour nine. The full guide is in 3D filament cost math.

Go deeper

• What ISO page yield actually measures — 19752, 19798 and 24711, and why your yield differs.
• Cost-per-page benchmarks by printer class — honest ranges from cartridge inkjets to tank printers to color lasers.
• Inkjet vs laser: the economics — when each wins, including the clogging problem the math hides.
• Duplex math — what double-sided printing does and doesn’t save.
• 3D filament cost math — grams vs meters, densities, waste, electricity.
• When third-party ink makes sense — the failure-rate-adjusted math, no brand shilling.

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Frequently asked questions

Where do I find my cartridge's page yield?

On the cartridge box, the printer's spec sheet, or the maker's online store listing — look for a number like "~300 pages" or "approx. 2,600 pages". That figure is measured under an ISO standard test (ISO/IEC 19752 for mono laser, 19798 for color laser, 24711 for inkjet) at roughly 5% coverage per channel. Watch for "starter" cartridges shipped with new printers: they're typically filled to 30–60% of a standard cartridge's yield.

What does "5% coverage" actually mean?

Five percent of the page area is printed with that channel — a normal double-spaced business letter is close to it. A dense report with charts might run 15–25%, a full-page photo is effectively 100% per color. The ISO rating exists so every maker quotes yield on the same page; your real pages decide how close you land to the number. The yield explainer walks through it.

How accurate is the coverage adjustment?

It's a linear approximation — assume twice the coverage uses twice the ink, so a 300-page cartridge gives ~150 pages at 10% coverage. Real cartridges land a bit below linear on inkjets (printhead cleaning burns ink no matter what you print) and roughly on-model for lasers. Use it to compare and budget, not to promise. The model and its limits are explained below.

Why does a color page charge the whole color set?

Because a typical color page uses all three channels at roughly equal coverage — that's exactly what the ISO color test assumes too. If your pages are mostly one color (a logo-heavy flyer that's all blue), enter that channel's cartridge separately: put its price and yield in the color fields and set the others aside. The math doesn't care whether "the set" is one field or three — the sum is the same.

Does duplex really halve my cost per page?

Only the paper part — duplex puts two page-images on one sheet, so paper cost per printed page halves, while ink or toner spend is unchanged. Since paper is usually the small term (a cent or two), duplex is a real but modest saving; its bigger win is half the paper storage and shipping weight. The numbers are in duplex math.

Should I just buy whichever printer has the lowest CPP?

Only if you print enough to reach the crossover — that's the point of the breakeven line below. A $160 laser that's cheaper per page than an $80 inkjet only pays back its extra $80 after enough pages at the lower rate; below that volume the inkjet is cheaper overall. Tank-style printers changed this game entirely — cheap ink and a mid-range sticker. See inkjet vs laser economics.

Do the numbers I type leave my browser?

No. Everything on this page is one JavaScript file doing arithmetic in this tab — there's no server doing the math, nothing is logged, and the page keeps working if you go offline after it loads. Details in the privacy policy.