Home office

Home office costs, per page and per hour

Printing is the purest cost per use question there is, because the printer is deliberately sold below what it is worth and the money is taken later, a page at a time. The rest of a desk is the opposite: hardware that costs real money up front and almost nothing to run. Both are worth working out, and they need to be worked out differently.

Read

Cost per page: ink vs compatible vs toner22 August 2026What a printed page really costs in the UK: original ink, third party cartridges and mono laser toner, with the printer's own cost divided in.
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Everything we have priced in this room

Priced at the tariffs shown in the bar at the top of the page. Sorted cheapest first.
Item	Running	Cost per use
Per hour
27 inch monitor	0.78p	3.54p
Laptop	1.17p	16.2p
Desktop PC	3.92p	17.8p
Per page
Printing, mono laser	2.38p	4.4p
Printing, inkjet with compatible ink	2.05p	5.39p
Printing, inkjet with original ink	8.35p	11.7p

Open the calculator to put your own tariff, your own purchase price and your own usage against any row above.

Worked through

The cheapest and the dearest of the things here that are measured in the same unit, with every term of the sum shown, so you can see which part of the number is the part that actually matters.

Printing, mono laser, 4.4p per page

Cost per page, the working

Purchase, £170 over 8,400 pages2.02p

Electricity, 0.003 × 26.11p0.08p

Consumable2.30p

Cost per page4.4p

Averaged across a print run, including the fuser warming up.

Printing, inkjet with original ink, 11.7p per page

Cost per page, the working

Purchase, £100 over 3,000 pages3.33p

Electricity, 0.002 × 26.11p0.05p

Consumable8.30p

Cost per page11.7p

Averaged across a print run.

The classic razor and blades product. The printer is close to free and the ink is, by weight, one of the more expensive liquids you will ever buy.

The same sum, applied in motoring, garden and diy and furniture and sleep. Or open the calculator and put your own numbers through it.

Prices used on this page

Electricity, 26.11p per kWh. Ofgem price cap, direct debit, average of England, Scotland and Wales, including 5% VAT.. Ofgem energy price cap unit rates and standing charges. Checked 22 August 2026.