Why this calculation decides your purchase
Printer hardware is frequently sold at or near cost, and the money comes back over years in supplies. That means the number on the box tells you almost nothing about what the printer will cost you, and the number that does — cost per page — is almost never printed anywhere you can read before buying.
The spread is not subtle. On the supplies in the presets above, the cheapest works out around 0.3 of a cent a black page and the dearest around 6.1 cents. That is roughly twenty-fold, on printers that sit on the same shelf.
How to use it well
- Find the exact supply your candidate printer takes — the specific cartridge or bottle number, not the family name. This is the step people skip, and it is where the answer is decided.
- Use the high-yield figure if a high-yield version exists. It is nearly always cheaper per page despite costing more on the shelf, and it is what you should actually buy.
- Use today’s price where you would really buy, not a list price. The presets here are dated figures from 27 September 2026 and are there as a starting point, not as current prices.
- Be honest about your monthly pages. Not your busiest week. Most households overestimate by a lot, and the overestimate is exactly what leads to buying more printer than the printing justifies.
- Fill in the printer price. It is the term that flips the answer at low volume, and it is the reason we recommend a mono laser so often.
What it deliberately does not count
- The drum, on a laser. A separate consumable rated around 15,000 pages on the models we cover. Most households never reach it; add it manually if you print heavily.
- Maintenance ink, on an inkjet. Print head cleaning uses ink that never reaches paper. Nobody itemizes it, so we cannot either — it is one more reason your real cost exceeds the rated figure.
- Electricity. A laser draws noticeably more while fusing, but at household volumes it is a rounding error and including a guess would imply precision we do not have.
The honest caveat, once more
Every rated page yield in existence assumes about 5% page coverage. Your documents almost certainly use more, so read the result as a floor. What holds reliably is the ranking: a printer twenty times cheaper per rated page is still dramatically cheaper on your real work. The method, the standards and a worked example.
Then what
If the arithmetic pointed you at bottle-fed ink, start with ink tank printers or go straight to the cheapest printers to run. If it pointed at a laser, start with laser printers for home use — and read inkjet vs laser if the two totals came out close.