Original ink: HP up 30% since 2022, more than double inflation

Conceptual illustration generated with AI. It is not a photograph of any of the cartridges analysed.

Anyone who prints at home often has the feeling that ink costs a little more every year. We wanted to see if the numbers back this up. We retrieved the prices shown on HP's and Epson's official online stores in Spain three and four years ago, compared them with today's, and set them alongside the official CPI figures from Spain's national statistics institute (INE) for each period.

The result is clear in one case and more nuanced in the other. All 27 cartridges in the sample have risen faster than inflation over their respective periods. For HP, the gap is wide: the median increase is more than double the CPI. For Epson, the increase exceeds the CPI in all cases, but in real terms remains at around 4%.

The short answer

Stripping out inflation, an HP cartridge in the sample costs a median of 13.1% more in real terms today than in 2022. For Epson, the median real increase is 3.7%.

HP: stepped price increases, almost every year

The most striking case is the HP 62XL black: it cost 49.99 € in August 2022 and costs 70.49 € today, up 41%. Its tri-colour version has gone from 54.99 € to 72.99 €. None of the 15 HP cartridges analysed has risen by less than 20%.

The price hikes come in jumps. In the archived copies, the 303XL black appears at 41.99 € during 2022, at 45.99 € in 2023, at 51.99 € in November 2024 and at 56.99 € in January 2026. The CSV includes the full history for each reference with all dates on which we found an archived copy of the product page.

Three items (953XL black, 303XL black and 903XL cyan) have their first archived price in January 2022. For these, the comparison CPI also starts in January 2022 and is higher, at 20%. Even so, all three rose significantly more: between 32.6% and 37.9%.

Epson: above the CPI, but with a narrower gap

For Epson, useful archived copies start later, between September 2022 and June 2023, so the periods are somewhat shorter. The increases range from 12% for the 33XL to 21.2% for the 16XL. All of them exceed inflation for their period, although in several cases only slightly: the 33XL rose by 12% with CPI inflation at 10.6%.

Epson often advertises discount coupons applied at checkout, such as 15% off selected cartridges advertised during this check. We have not applied these either today or in old archived copies. We always compare the price shown on the product page before any coupon.

HP's Spanish store, the most expensive of the six we checked

On 23 October 2026, we also checked HP's official stores in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. We found 23 cartridges sold simultaneously in Spain and in at least one of those other stores. In all 23, the Spanish price was the highest.

The difference is small and very consistent. Compared with the median price of the other stores, Spain charges a median of 4.6% more, and compared with the cheapest store for each cartridge, between 4.8% and 8.1% more. VAT does not explain it: excluding tax, the difference remains 4.5%. Italy, with a VAT rate of 22%, higher than Spain's, was the cheapest store for 12 of the 23 cartridges.

HP's stores in Portugal and Austria did not allow automated checking that day, so they have been excluded from the comparison.

How we measured it

Historic prices come from archived product pages saved by the Internet Archive. For each cartridge, we took the earliest available copy since January 2022 that displayed a price. For HP, we checked the page code itself to confirm it was the regular price and that no promotional price was applied. For Epson, we used the 'Epson Price' visible on the product sheet. Current prices were checked on 23 October 2026 on the same official stores.

For inflation, we used the headline CPI index from Spain's INE. The series with base year 2021 runs through December 2025. For September 2026, we applied the definitive annual rate published by INE on 14 October 2026 (4.9%) to the September 2025 index (118.485). The result, 124.29, also matches the year-to-date cumulative change published by INE. Each cartridge is compared with inflation from the month of its earliest price to September 2026.

Internet Archive snapshots are not taken at regular intervals, which is why starting dates vary from cartridge to cartridge. We publish them all, line by line, so anyone can open them and verify the price.

What you can do if you print at home

The price of a cartridge tells you little on its own. What counts is how much you pay per page. XL formats usually work out cheaper per page than standard ones, and it is worth comparing against the manufacturer's declared yield for the same code. In our guide on the real cost of printing we explain how to calculate this, and in the price per litre of 20 Epson cartridges we apply the same method to a specific sample.

If you are buying a printer soon, look at expected ink expenditure over the coming years and not just the machine's purchase price. We calculated this for several models in Black Friday 2026: the real cost of a printer over three years.

Startoner sells compatible ink cartridges, so we have a commercial interest in this subject and prefer to state it openly. That is why this study measures only official manufacturer prices, using public sources that anyone can inspect, and includes no comparison with our own products.