Cost per page is the price of a supply divided by the number of pages the manufacturer rates it for. That is the whole formula. It takes ten seconds and it changes which printer you should buy more than any other single piece of information — which is why it is strange how rarely a printer roundup prints it.
The formula
Worked through on real numbers we read on 27 September 2026: an Epson 522 black ink bottle listed at $17.99 and rated at 4,500 pages gives about 0.4 of a cent per black page. A Brother TN830XL high-yield toner cartridge at $98.29 rated at 3,000 pages gives about 3.3 cents. The Canon GI-21 bottle comes out lowest of all at about 0.3 of a cent.
Those three numbers are the reason this site exists. They differ by roughly a factor of ten, and none of them is visible on the box.
What ISO 5% coverage means, and why your cost is higher
Every rated page yield you will ever see assumes a standard test page with about 5% of its area covered in ink or toner. Toner Buzz describes that as roughly one third of a page of double-spaced text. It is a real standard and it makes printers comparable to one another, which is genuinely useful. It is also less ink than most real documents use.
So treat every cost-per-page figure — ours included — as a floor rather than a forecast. If you print dense reports, photographs, or anything with a colored background, your real cost will be a multiple of the rated figure. The ranking between printers holds; the absolute number does not.
Why tank ink is so much cheaper
It is not that the ink itself is different. It is what it is sold in. A chipped cartridge is a small plastic assembly containing a modest amount of ink, and a large part of its price is the assembly, the chip, the packaging and the distribution. A bottle is a bottle. The 170 mL Canon GI-21 bottle holds enough ink for 6,000 rated pages and costs about the same as a single high-yield cartridge that would do a fraction of that.
Toner sits in between. It is a dry powder in a cartridge with a delivery mechanism, which is why it costs several cents a page rather than a fraction of one — and why it is nonetheless far cheaper than liquid ink in cartridges.
The costs that are not ink
- Paper. Roughly a cent a sheet. Automatic two-sided printing halves it, which is why we treat a duplexer as the one feature genuinely worth paying for.
- The drum, on a laser. A separate consumable rated around 15,000 pages on the Brother models we cover. Most households never reach it; heavy users should count it.
- Maintenance ink, on an inkjet. Print heads clean themselves, and that uses ink you never see on paper. It is real, it is not itemized by anyone, and it is another reason to read rated yields as optimistic.
- The printer itself. Amortized over the pages you print. This is the term that makes a cheap laser beat an expensive tank printer at low volumes, and it flips the other way fast as volume rises.
The published industry ranges
| Printer type | Published range |
|---|---|
| Mono laser | around 5 to 8 cents a page |
| Color laser | between 12 and 15 cents a page |
| Cartridge inkjet, black | about 7.5 cents a page |
| Cartridge inkjet, color | about 20 cents a page |
All four figures are Toner Buzz’s, read on 27 September 2026. They are quoted here as context and are not measurements of ours. We publish only figures we can derive from a named supply price and a published rated yield.
Doing it for your own printing
- Find the supply your printer actually takes — the exact cartridge or bottle number, not the family name.
- Look up its rated page yield on the manufacturer’s page, and note whether the figure is for the standard or the high-yield version.
- Note today’s price from wherever you would actually buy it.
- Divide, then multiply by the pages you print in a month to get a monthly ink cost you can compare against a subscription.
Or let the calculator do all four steps. It runs entirely in your browser, needs no sign-up, and shows its working so you can check it rather than trust it.
If you would rather skip to the answer, the cheapest printers to run ranks every model we cover by the figure this page explains.
What we will never do with these numbers
Publish one without its inputs. Every cost-per-page figure on this site shows the supply, its rated yield, the price we used and the date we read it, and links back to the method. Prices move; a bare number with no date is a number you cannot check, and a number you cannot check is not worth publishing.
