Home office, cost per month
Printer running cost: per page, per month and on standby
A printer's list price and its ink or toner price are usually judged separately: one at the shop, one every few months when the cartridge light comes on. Add in what a printer draws simply for being switched on and waiting, divided into a single monthly bill, and the ranking of inkjet against mono laser against colour laser looks different from either half on its own.
Some links on this page are affiliate links, which earn us a commission if you buy. It costs you nothing extra, and it never changes which option comes out cheapest here, because the ranking is arithmetic. How this works.
The ranking at 200 pages a month
At a stated 200 pages a month, black text at 5% coverage, the mono laser costs £6.85 a month and the inkjet, original ink costs £18.62, a gap of 2.7 times. Run that gap across a year and it is £141 between the cheapest machine here and the dearest, for printing exactly the same amount of paper.
| Option | Running | Cost per month | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mono laser£150 machine, £60 toner every 2,600 pages | £5.07 | £6.85 | |
| Colour laser, printing black text£280 machine, £55 black toner every 1,200 pages | £9.82 | £13.71 | |
| Inkjet, original ink£100 machine, £25 cartridge every 300 pages | £16.96 | £18.62 |
Ink is still the story. The consumable line dominates every total here the same way it does on the per-page version of this comparison: the inkjet's cartridge alone costs more each month than the laser's entire total, machine, toner and electricity, combined.
The standby line nobody prices
Every figure above includes a printer sitting idle for the rest of the month: waiting on the network for the next job, keeping a laser's fuser part warmed rather than fully cold, staying reachable for a phone to print to it without a power button being pressed first. In all three machines here, that idle draw uses more electricity over a month than the printing itself does. It still barely moves the total, because electricity of any kind is a small fraction of what a printer costs to run. The ink or toner decides the answer long before the socket does.
We have used typical network standby wattages for an inkjet, a mono laser and a colour laser rather than a measured reading from a specific model, and said so rather than presenting it as measured. A printer switched off at the wall between uses removes this line entirely and moves every total here down by a few pence a month, not enough to change the ranking.
Where the money actually goes
The laser's own price and its electricity are both small lines. What makes it the cheapest option is a toner cartridge rated in the thousands of pages rather than the hundreds, which turns a big number on the shelf into a small number per page.
What changes at 50 pages a month, or 500
Turn the volume down toward the low end of home printing and the machine's own price starts to matter more than its cartridge, because the purchase cost is fixed at a set amount a month regardless of how many pages you print, while the toner cost falls with it. That favours the cheaper machine: an inkjet becomes the least bad option for somebody printing a handful of pages a month, not because its ink is cheap but because a laser's higher purchase price has too few pages to spread across. Turn the volume up toward the high end and the reverse happens quickly: the cartridge cost swamps the purchase price within the first year, and the laser's cheaper toner wins by a wider margin than it does at 200 pages a month. The crossover between the two sits at a fairly low volume, which is why a laser is the default recommendation for almost any household that prints regularly rather than occasionally.
Colour as an insurance premium
The colour laser above is priced printing black text only, on purpose, because that is the honest way to isolate what colour capability costs before you have used it once. It comes to £13.71 a month against £6.85 for the mono laser it is otherwise identical to, for printing exactly the same black pages. That gap is the machine's higher price and its pricier black cartridge, nothing to do with colour ink, because none was used.
If you print in colour rarely, that gap buys you the option rather than the pages. Whether it is worth paying depends on how often the option actually gets used, which is a household question this site is not equipped to answer, only to price.
The verdict
A mono laser is the cheapest way to print at 200 pages a month by a wide margin, and the gap only grows at higher volumes. An inkjet wins only for somebody printing rarely enough that the machine's own price matters more than its cartridge, a real household but a shrinking one now that laser prices have come down. A colour laser is a genuine choice if you actually print in colour; priced against pages it never touches, it is simply the mono laser plus a premium, and the arithmetic here cannot tell you whether that premium is worth paying, because that part is a preference, not a cost.
Put your own numbers in
Prefilled with a mono laser at 200 pages a month. Swap in your own cartridge price, page yield and volume and the working updates.
Cost per meal
Set the purchase price to zero for the running cost alone.
Questions
Is a laser printer cheaper than an inkjet to run every month?
Yes, by a wide margin at ordinary volumes. At 200 pages a month a mono laser comes to £6.85 against £18.62 for an inkjet on original ink, almost entirely down to the cartridge rather than the machine or the electricity.
Does a printer cost money when it is switched on but not printing?
A small amount, and it adds up to more electricity over a month than the actual printing does, because a printer left on a network spends most of the month idle rather than mid job. It is still a minor part of the total; the ink or toner decides the answer, not the socket.
How much more does a colour laser cost than a mono laser?
Printing the same black pages, £13.71 a month against £6.85 for the mono equivalent, purely for the machine's higher price and a pricier black cartridge. That gap exists whether or not you ever print in colour.
Is an inkjet ever the cheaper printer to run?
Only at low volumes, where the laser's higher purchase price has too few pages a month to spread across. Above a fairly modest volume the toner cartridge's lower cost per page overtakes it.
What is left out of these figures?
Colour ink or toner, since the comparison holds volume and content fixed at black text; paper, which costs about the same regardless of machine; and the maintenance cycles an inkjet runs to clear a clogged head, which can be significant for a printer used only occasionally and is not something a laser has to do at all.
Related
- Cost per wash: pressure washer or a hand car washA pressure washer against a hand car wash at UK forecourt prices, per wash and at the number of washes it takes to pay for itself.
- Cost per kWh of heat: gas, electric, wood and heat pumpThe fuel price is not the cost of heat. Divide by how much of it a boiler, a heater, a stove and a heat pump actually turn into warmth in the room.
- What a kWh really costs, once the standing charge is inThe capped unit rate is not what you pay per kWh. Add the standing charge and a low user pays more for each unit than a high user on the same tariff.
More home office costs, or read how we work these out.
Prices used on this page
- Electricity, 26.32p 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 1 October 2026.