Back to school: the true cost of printing at home for an entire school year

The figure that surprises every parent

Printing everything a child needs for a whole school year costs less in consumables than a notebook. With a monochrome laser printer and a third-party compatible cartridge, printing 540 pages over a school year costs around 2,78 € in toner and imaging drum use. With a refillable ink tank printer, it costs 0,27 €.

That figure comes as a surprise because back-to-school spending runs into hundreds of euros and a printer is often on the list. But the real expense is not the ink. It is the printer itself, and above all, making a poor, rushed purchase during the first week of September.

The figures in this guide come from our own catalogue: the selling price divided by the stated page yield of each product, based on 151 products with a published page yield. You can calculate it yourself using any product on the website.

The rest of this guide explains where each figure comes from, which decision really makes a difference and when printing at home is not worthwhile. If you are looking for the general cost-per-page formula, we explain it in detail in cost per copy: how to calculate and reduce it.

What actually gets printed during a school year

Before calculating anything, it is worth knowing what you are going to print, because the actual volume is almost always lower than people estimate. In primary and secondary school, most printing consists of worksheets and exercises sent by the school as PDFs, notes and summaries, the occasional assignment with images, and miscellaneous paperwork: permission slips, absence notes and school supply lists.

Three scenarios cover almost everyone. A school year has around 36 teaching weeks.

The figures cover consumables: toner plus the imaging drum unit for the laser printer, cartridges for the inkjet printer and ink bottles for the refillable ink tank printer. They do not include paper or the printer itself, which are separate costs and, as you will see, have a much greater impact.

How much each page costs by printer type

The catalogue median is 0,42 cents per page for third-party compatible monochrome toner and 0,05 cents for refillable ink tank bottles. Ink tanks cost eight times less than ink cartridges, and eight times less than laser printers.

Two warnings to help you read this table correctly, because this is where almost every comparison is misleading.

For laser printers, you need to add the imaging drum. Toner does not print by itself. The imaging drum is a separate component that lasts much longer, with a median page yield of around 15.500 pages in our catalogue, but it still costs money. Adding both together, the real cost of a monochrome laser page is around 0,515 cents, not 0,419.

For colour printing, you need to multiply by four. The figure of 0,494 cents is per cartridge. A colour page uses black and all three colours at once, so as a practical rule, a full-colour page costs around four times that amount, approximately 2 cents. That is still not much, but it is not the same.

The declared page yield used in our calculation follows ISO 19752 for monochrome toner, ISO 19798 for colour toner and ISO 24711 for inkjet cartridges. They all measure page yield at 5 % page coverage, which uses considerably less ink than a sheet of A4 paper covered with homework and drawings. We explain this fully in how many pages a cartridge prints. If you are deciding between ink and laser from the outset, start with ink cartridge or toner. If you are interested in a refillable ink tank printer, read EcoTank vs MegaTank vs Smart Tank.

Paper costs more than toner

A ream of 500 sheets of A4 paper priced between 4 and 6 € works out at between 0,8 and 1,2 cents per sheet, between 1,6 and 2,3 times the cost of the third-party compatible monochrome toner used to print on it. This is the figure that surprises people most when they first see it, and it is easy to check: look at the price of a ream in any supermarket this week and divide it by 500.

When using third-party compatible consumables, the blank sheet of A4 paper is the expensive part of the printed page.

This has a practical consequence that almost nobody acts on: if you want to reduce your household printing costs, negotiating the price of the cartridge is the small lever. Printing double-sided is the big one. Every sheet used on both sides saves you more than switching toner brands.

The only thing that really determines your cost

There is a 33-fold difference in cost per page between the most efficient mono toner in our catalogue and the least efficient: from 0,060 to 1,998 cents. That difference does not depend on where you buy or whether you find the right deal. It depends on which cartridge the printer you already have at home gets through.

That is why two families with identical habits can spend 12 € or 400 € printing the same material. It is not the supplier. It is the machine.

Look at the third row. Choosing the right machine saves 388 €. The discount is real and applied automatically, but its impact is six times smaller than the other factor.

For a family, this translates into something very practical: if you are buying a printer, check the cartridge price and page yield before looking at the printer's price. A 60 € machine that uses 1.000-page cartridges costs more over three years than a 190 € machine that uses 10.000-page cartridges.

Do you need colour for homework?

Not for almost anything a school assigns. Worksheets, exercises, notes, revision tests and permission slips are black text on a white background. Colour is mainly needed for art projects, posters, presentations and little else.

Based on our median figures, a school year involving 540 black-and-white pages costs around 2,78 € in consumables. Printing the entire school year's work in colour would cost about 10,80 €. The difference is 8 €. Over a whole school year.

That is why the honest recommendation is not "do without colour". It is this: do not pay extra for a colour printer that you will use in black and white almost all the time, and if you already have one, make black and white the default profile. A poorly configured colour laser printer uses colour to print pages containing only black text, and that does make a difference.

How to avoid running out in November

The costly back-to-school mistake is not buying a cartridge, it is failing to buy one and running out on a Sunday night with an assignment due the next day. That is when you pay three times the price, at the first place that is open and for the first cartridge that fits.

The calculation to avoid that is simple. Take your scenario from the table above, check the page yield of the cartridge you use and divide.

An example using the catalogue median: a 3.000-page monochrome toner cartridge covers a school year of moderate use (540 pages) with plenty to spare, and in fact lasts for more than five school years. A 550-page ink cartridge, however, is only just enough for one school year of moderate use, and falls short if usage is high.

And there is one important detail that always comes up: the stated page yield is measured at 5 % coverage. A worksheet with illustrations, coloured borders or a map uses considerably more ink or toner. In practice, it is best to expect fewer pages than the number shown on the box, especially with illustrated school materials.

When printing at home is NOT worthwhile

If you are going to print fewer than around 2.000 to 4.000 pages in total, buying a printer for back to school is not cost-effective compared with using a print shop. It is the part that consumables retailers rarely mention, so we are telling you.

The calculation: a laser multifunction printer costs around 190 €. Printing at home costs half a cent per page. At a print shop, black-and-white printing usually costs between 5 and 10 cents. The break-even point is between 2.000 and 4.200 pages, depending on what your local print shop charges.

Compare those figures with the scenarios at the start. Average use is 15 pages per week. Heavy use is 40. Neither reaches 56. With the printing volume of just one primary school child, using a print shop is cheaper than buying a new printer.

The equation changes completely in three cases: when you already have a printer and only need to replace the consumable, which is the situation for most people; when there are several children and the volume multiplies; and when the printer is also used for work or higher education. In all three cases, printing at home is the clear winner.

If you conclude that buying one is worthwhile, we explain the choice between laser, inkjet and ink tank printers in which printer to buy for studying. And if the purchase is being decided by a school rather than a family, the situation is different: we cover it in toner for schools and academies.