Printer cost-to-print index

Data as of August 2026 · across 239 models with a known cartridge price. The cost of printing across the whole catalogue, in aggregate — not a ranking of which printer to buy, but where the typical model actually sits. Every figure is a real cost per page: an OEM black cartridge’s price divided by its rated yield.

Cost per page, by print technology

Ink-tank printing sits an order of magnitude below laser, and laser below cartridge inkjet — the gap between the median rows below is the whole reason running cost, not sticker price, decides what a printer costs you.

Print type	Models	Median	25th pct	75th pct	Cheapest	Dearest
Laser	112	2.3¢	1.3¢	3.4¢	0.3¢	36.6¢
Inkjet	84	5.0¢	3.8¢	8.8¢	1.2¢	28.4¢
Ink-tank	43	0.4¢	0.4¢	0.5¢	0.3¢	11.6¢

Mono (black-page) cost per page, in cents.

Cost per page, by brand

A reference view of where each brand’s models cluster — sorted by median, not ranked. A low median can mean a brand leans on ink-tank models rather than that any single printer is cheapest.

Brand	Models	Median	25th pct	75th pct	Cheapest	Dearest
Kyocera	25	1.0¢	0.7¢	2.0¢	0.3¢	4.4¢
Lexmark	22	1.6¢	1.4¢	2.5¢	0.6¢	36.6¢
Epson	52	2.2¢	0.4¢	4.4¢	0.3¢	9.7¢
Xerox	6	2.9¢	2.3¢	4.8¢	2.3¢	5.3¢
Brother	44	3.2¢	1.8¢	4.4¢	1.2¢	28.4¢
HP	52	3.8¢	2.7¢	7.3¢	0.4¢	16.8¢
Canon	32	4.9¢	1.1¢	7.1¢	0.4¢	13.3¢

Mono cost per page, in cents. Brands with fewer than 5 priced models (OKI, Ricoh) are omitted.

Mono vs colour

The intuition that colour always costs more only holds for laser. On ink-tank and cartridge-inkjet models a colour page’s median runs below the black-page median — the colour channels draw from the same cheap high-yield tanks, so the per-page arithmetic flips.

Print type	Models	Mono median	Colour median	Colour ÷ mono
Laser	54	2.9¢	4.2¢	×1.45
Inkjet	76	4.8¢	3.8¢	×0.79
Ink-tank	23	0.4¢	0.3¢	×0.75

Medians over the models that publish both a mono and a colour cost per page, in cents.

What’s in the sample

The index covers 239 of 291 published models — the ones with a trusted cartridge yield and a live price. The 52 left out are almost entirely a missing cartridge price (50 of 52), not weak yield data — so the numbers above rest on real, page-yield-backed cost, never a guessed figure.

Method

Cost per page = cartridge price ÷ ISO page yield. Prices are live Amazon US offers, refreshed nightly. Compatible (third-party) cartridges and structural supplies — drums, imaging units, maintenance kits and printheads — are excluded, as are any models without a trusted yield or a matched price. “Mono” is the cost of a black page; “colour” is a colour page. Every figure here is aggregated on the fly from those per-model costs; nothing is stored.