Average Business Printing Costs Per Month: 2026 Guide

Table of Contents

• Average Business Printing Costs Per Month: What to Expect
• What Makes Up Your Monthly Printing Bill
  • Hardware, Consumables and Maintenance
• Business Printing Cost Per Page Explained
• Printer Running Costs You Might Be Missing
• Managed Print Services Costs: Worth the Outlay?
• How to Calculate Your Average Monthly Printing Costs
• Ways to Reduce Business Printing Costs
• Conclusion
• Frequently Asked Questions

Last Updated: 16 October 2026

Average Business Printing Costs Per Month: What to Expect

Most organisations have no clear picture of what they spend on printing each month. The costs hide across paper invoices, toner orders, service contracts and lease agreements that never appear on one page. At Crispin Associates, we have helped organisations across education, healthcare, charities and the corporate sector get a grip on this since 2000. Working out your average business printing costs per month starts with one honest number: your total cost per page, multiplied by your actual print volume. This guide breaks down every cost category, shows you how to calculate your real figure, and explains the practical steps that reduce it. According to WRAP research on office resource use, paper waste and unnecessary printing remain among the easiest office costs to cut.

What Makes Up Your Monthly Printing Bill

Your monthly printing bill has four parts: hardware, consumables, maintenance and the hidden costs most organisations never track. Hardware covers lease or purchase payments. Consumables cover paper, toner and ink. Maintenance covers service visits and repairs. The fourth part, hidden costs, is where budgets quietly leak.

Hardware, Consumables and Maintenance

Each cost behaves differently, which is why a single monthly figure is hard to pin down.

• Hardware: Lease payments spread the cost; buying ties up capital upfront
• Consumables: Toner and paper scale directly with print volume
• Maintenance: Service contracts, call-out charges and parts
• Downtime: Staff time lost when a printer fails mid-job

A common mistake is treating the lease payment as the whole cost. It rarely is. In practice, consumables and maintenance often add more to the monthly total than the hardware itself.

Business Printing Cost Per Page Explained

Business printing cost per page is the total cost of producing one printed page, including paper, toner, maintenance and hardware. It is the single most useful number for comparing devices and spotting waste. A mono laser page costs far less to produce than a colour page, because colour toner is more expensive and colour jobs use more of it.

To work out your own figure, divide your total monthly printing spend by your monthly page count. Do this per device, not just across the fleet. One old machine running colour-heavy jobs can distort the whole picture. According to The Carbon Trust guidance on office equipment efficiency, older devices often consume more energy and materials per page, which pushes cost per page up over time.

Printer Running Costs You Might Be Missing

Printer running costs go well beyond toner and paper. The costs most organisations miss are:

• Energy use: Older devices draw power all day, even idle
• Wasted output: Pages printed and never collected
• Duplicate printing: The same document printed because nobody can find the first copy
• Over-ordering toner: Buying before you need it ties up cash and stock
• Unmanaged colour: Colour jobs on documents that only needed mono

The fix is visibility. You cannot reduce what you cannot see. A simple print audit, tracking volume by device and by user, usually reveals the biggest offenders within a month.

Managed Print Services Costs: Worth the Outlay?

Managed print services costs cover a provider taking responsibility for your entire print estate: supply, service, maintenance and reporting, usually for a fixed monthly fee based on volume. Whether it is worth the outlay depends on how much time your team currently spends managing printers.

For organisations with multiple devices and stretched IT teams, the case is strong. You move from unpredictable repair bills to a predictable monthly figure. You also get reporting that shows exactly where pages are going. For a single small printer in a small office, the maths may not work as well.

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At Crispin Associates, we provide managed print alongside printers, copiers, digital signage and interactive displays, with full manufacturer support and a focus on environmentally-friendly office operations. That combination matters when sustainability targets sit alongside budget targets.

How to Calculate Your Average Monthly Printing Costs

Calculating your average monthly printing costs takes about an hour and gives you a figure you can actually manage. Follow these steps:

1. List every printing device in your organisation, including small desktop printers
2. Pull the page counters from each device for the last three months
3. Add up all consumables (paper, toner, ink) for the same period
4. Add lease or purchase costs and any service contract fees
5. Add maintenance and repair invoices from the same three months
6. Divide the total by three to get your monthly average
7. Divide again by total pages to get your cost per page

Do this quarterly. Costs drift as devices age and volumes change. The table below shows how the four cost types behave:

Ways to Reduce Business Printing Costs

Reducing business printing costs comes down to three levers: print less, print smarter, and manage the fleet properly. Start with the cheapest changes first.

• Set mono as the default on every device
• Enable double-sided printing as standard
• Use secure print release so jobs only print when collected
• Introduce print quotas by team or user
• Digitise approval workflows to cut routine paperwork
• Right-size the fleet by removing underused devices
• Review the estate annually with usage data, not guesswork

Most organisations find that defaults and secure release alone remove a meaningful share of waste, because so much printing is accidental. For a procurement team needing compliance-friendly, budget-friendly equipment, a managed approach with clear reporting makes those savings measurable.

Conclusion

Getting a firm grip on your average business printing costs per month is the first step to reducing them. The organisations that struggle most are those without visibility, not those without budget. Crispin Associates supplies and supports printers, copiers, digital signage and interactive displays, backed by complete manufacturer support and environmentally-friendly advice. We have helped organisations across education, corporate, charity and public sector settings since 2000. Contact us to review your print estate and find out where your costs are actually going.