“How much does a page cost to print?” has no single answer — but it has a small set of honest ranges, because every printer sold falls into one of a handful of economic classes. Here they are, with the street-price math that puts a device in its band. These are ranges, not quotes — cartridge prices drift by retailer and season, and your coverage rewrites all of it — but they’re the right ranges to sanity-check a purchase or spot a billing problem.

The classes, cheapest first

printer class	mono ¢/page	color ¢/page	typical sticker
ink tank / bottle inkjet	0.3–1¢	1–3¢	$200–400
mono laser (high-cap toner)	2–3¢	—	$150–300
mono laser (standard toner)	3–5¢	—	$100–200
business inkjet (high-cap carts)	2–4¢	6–10¢	$200–450
color laser	2.5–5¢	12–25¢	$250–600
cartridge inkjet (standard)	5–10¢	15–25¢	$60–150
cartridge inkjet (budget)	8–15¢	20–35¢	$40–80

Paper adds ~1–1.5¢ to every row (a $6.50 ream of 500) — the only term that doesn’t care what you bought. Duplex halves it; nothing else touches it. These assume ~5% coverage per channel on the ISO test basis, so photo pages and dense flyers land multiples higher (coverage math explains the rescaling).

Reading the table like a bill

Three patterns explain almost every “why is printing so expensive” conversation:

Cheap printers sell expensive pages. The $50 cartridge inkjet is the razor; the cartridges are the blades. At 8–15¢ mono and 20–35¢ color, printing 150 pages a month costs $15–40 in consumables — $180–480 a year, forever, on a printer that cost less than dinner. This is the pricing model working as designed.

Tank printers broke the model — at a price. Bottle-refill inkjets flipped the economics: ~0.3–1¢ mono and ~1–3¢ color, because you’re buying ink by the milliliter instead of by the cartridge. The catch is the sticker ($250+ buys a lot of 10¢ pages) and the commitment — a tank printer you don’t use dries up like any inkjet. It wins when the volume is real.

Laser is the middle path that never clogs. Mono lasers sit at 2–5¢/page with a toner that can’t dry out between monthly jobs — which is why they dominate sporadic-use desks even where inkjets print cheaper on paper. Color lasers keep the mono economy but color pages land 12–25¢ — full-laser color is the most expensive way to put a chart on a page that isn’t a photo print.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure above is just street cartridge price ÷ rated yield, the calculator’s own formula:

• A $24 black cartridge rated 300 pages = 8¢/page before paper.
• A $62 toner rated 2,600 pages = 2.4¢/page.
• A $13 ink bottle rated ~4,500 pages = ~0.3¢/page.

The same division, run on any cartridge you’re considering, tells you its class in ten seconds. That simplicity is the point — nobody needs a spreadsheet to find out a cartridge is overpriced, they just need to actually divide once.

The three gotchas that bend every benchmark

1. Starter cartridges. The cartridges in the box are 30–60% fills — your first cartridge set always delivers the worst CPP the printer will ever produce. Judge a printer on its replacement cartridge math.
2. High-capacity options. Most lines offer an XL/high-yield variant at 1.3–1.6× the price for 2–3× the pages — almost always the right buy if you’ll finish it. The exceptions are low-volume inkjets where the ink expires first.
3. The drum. Laser printers with a separate imaging drum add a consumable with its own price and yield (commonly 3–5× the toner’s). Drum CPP is small (~0.5–1¢) but real — add it when comparing against integrated-cartridge models.

Benchmarks are for orientation, not shopping: once you have a candidate, put its actual cartridge price and yield in the calculator — your coverage and volume turn a class average into your number, which is the only one that pays your bills. For the purchase-decision version of this math, see inkjet vs laser economics.

Frequently asked questions

What's a good cost per page?

Under 3¢ for mono is good, under 1¢ is tank-printer territory. Color under 10¢ is decent, under 3¢ is excellent. But 'good' depends on volume: paying 10¢/page when you print 20 pages a month is $2 — irrelevant. The same rate at 500 pages/month is $50 — the printer's ink costs more than the printer did in a year.

Why are color pages so much more expensive?

You're spending four cartridges at once — black plus three color channels — and color cartridges carry similar prices to black at similar yields, so a color page roughly triples-plus the ink bill. Paper doesn't change. It's why 'print in color only when color earns its keep' is the cheapest policy in any office.

Do bigger cartridges always give a lower CPP?

High-capacity/XL versions nearly always do — the shell costs the maker the same, so extra fill is priced below proportion. The exception: inkjet ink has a shelf life, and a cartridge you can't finish before it dries or expires is wasted money no matter how good the per-page math looked.

What about third-party cartridges in these ranges?

Compatible and remanufactured cartridges typically cut cartridge cost 30–60%, which moves CPP accordingly — with a reliability spread that also moves it the other way when a unit fails early. The failure-rate-adjusted math is in when third-party ink makes sense.

Where does a copy shop land on this scale?

Retail print counters run ~10–25¢ mono and ~40–80¢ color — the convenience premium over any home printer. But the crossover math can still favor them: at 10 pages a month, $2/month at the shop beats any printer you'll buy, maintain and eventually landfill.