What does a color laser printer cost per page?
Toner Buzz puts color laser printing at between 12 and 15 cents a page, read on 27 September 2026. On the color laser we price, the high-yield black cartridge works out at about 3.2 cents a page by our own arithmetic. A bottle-fed tank printer prints an ISO color page for about 1.1 cents, which is the comparison that usually settles it.
Color laser cost per page is one of the hardest numbers on this site to publish honestly, and the reason is structural: there are four cartridges rather than one, their prices are not always published where a reader can check them, and the parts beyond toner — drum, belt, waste container — are real costs that most cost-per-page figures quietly omit. This page sets out what we could verify and what we could not.
Why we do not publish a single color laser figure
Our method is fixed: supply price divided by rated page yield, with both inputs read from a source we can cite and dated. For an ISO color page that means four inputs, because a color page draws from black, cyan, magenta and yellow.
For the Brother HL-L3220CDW we have a confirmed price and yield for the high-yield black TN229XL: 3,000 pages at $96.29, read on 27 September 2026. We do not have confirmed prices for the cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges in that family. Under the rule this site runs on, that means no color figure gets published rather than an estimated one.
What we can establish
| Figure | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Color laser, color page | between 12 and 15 cents a page | Toner Buzz, read 27 September 2026 — their figure, not ours |
| Mono laser, black page | around 5 to 8 cents a page | Toner Buzz, read 27 September 2026 — their figure, not ours |
| HL-L3220CDW, black page | About 3.2¢ | Our arithmetic: Brother TN229XL black high-yield toner cartridge at 96.29 ÷ 3,000 pages |
| HL-L3220CDW, color page | Not published | No confirmed price for the cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges |
| EcoTank ET-2800, color page | About 1.1¢ | Our arithmetic on Epson 522 bottle prices and rated yields |
| MegaTank G3270, color page | About 0.8¢ | Our arithmetic on Canon GI-21 bottle prices and rated yields |
Industry ranges are Toner Buzz’s figures and are attributed as theirs; we have not measured them. page yields are based on printing with 5% page coverage, which Toner Buzz describes as "approximately one-third of a page of double-spaced text". Our own figures are supply price divided by the manufacturer’s rated yield at ISO 5% coverage.
Even with the gap in the middle of that table, the ordering is not in doubt. The published industry range for color laser sits at between 12 and 15 cents a page; our own confirmed tank figures are around a cent. That is a difference of roughly an order of magnitude, and no missing cartridge price is going to close it.
The four-cartridge problem
A mono laser has one consumable decision: buy the standard cartridge or the high-yield one. A color laser has four, and they do not empty evenly. Print a lot of blue-heavy slides and cyan goes first; print photographs and magenta does. The result is that you buy cartridges more often than the per-page arithmetic implies, because you replace whichever one ran out rather than a set.
Brother’s approach helps here. The HL-L3220CDW uses four separate cartridges, so one exhausted color does not mean replacing all of them — a genuine advantage over designs that combine the three colors in one unit. It also means four part numbers to keep track of, and a starter set rated at 1,000 pages each that will empty sooner than anyone expects.
- Yields are rated at 5% coverage per color. An ISO color page is a modest amount of ink. Anything resembling a full-page graphic uses several times that, so your real cost per page will be higher than any rated figure.
- Starter cartridges are not full cartridges. 1,000 pages each on this model, against 3,000 for the high-yield black replacement.
- High-yield is almost always cheaper per page. The TN229XL at about 3.2 cents is the pattern: more up front, less per page. The same holds on the mono side, where the TN830XL at about 3.3 cents beats the standard TN830 at about 5.1 cents.
The costs beyond toner
Cost per page conventionally means supplies, and on a color laser that undercounts. A color laser has a drum, a transfer belt and a waste toner container, all of which are consumable parts with finite lives. We exclude them from every headline figure on this site for consistency, and we say so rather than pretending they are free.
Brother publishes drum lives for its mono models — approximately 15,000 pages for the DR830 on the HL-L2460DW, approximately 45,000 for the DR920 on its business machines — which gives a sense of the order of magnitude. Spread across tens of thousands of pages a drum adds a fraction of a cent; replaced early because of a fault, it is a significant bill. Treat any cost-per-page figure, ours included, as the supply cost rather than the true cost of ownership.
When a color laser is still the right buy
Despite all of the above, there are households and offices for which a color laser is clearly correct, and they have one thing in common: the printer sits idle for long stretches and still has to work.
- Occasional color with long gaps. Toner is a dry powder. It does not clog a print head because there is no print head. The dry-out question, answered properly.
- Output that gets handled. Fused toner does not smear or run when a page gets damp, which matters for documents that leave the building.
- Mostly black with some color. If nine pages in ten are text, the color cartridges last a long time and the per-color-page figure stops dominating.
- Speed on mono. Even a modest color laser prints text faster than a tank printer.
If none of those describes you, a tank printer is both cheaper and simpler. The two technologies are set against each other properly in color laser versus ink tank, and the ranked color-laser picks are in best color laser printers for home.
Working out your own figure
Because we cannot publish a complete color laser figure, the useful thing we can do is show you how to produce one for the specific printer in front of you. It takes about a minute.
- Find the price and rated yield of the black cartridge, and divide price by yield. That is your cost per black page.
- Do the same for one color cartridge. Cartridges in a family are usually sold at the same price and rated yield across the three colors.
- For an ISO color page, add the black figure to three times the color figure — one for each color channel. That is the same arithmetic our own figures use.
- Multiply by your monthly pages and by thirty-six for a three-year supply bill. Our calculator does all of this if you would rather not.
Do it with the real cartridge prices in front of you and the color-laser decision usually makes itself. The pattern we keep finding is that people are not comparing printers at all — they are comparing a sticker price against a running cost, and those are not the same kind of number. The cheapest printers to run, ranked.