Arthur Garcia $725. That’s what the average employee costs their employer in printing expenses every single year. Multiply that across 50 people and you’re looking at over $36,000 annually before a single hidden cost enters the picture. Most finance teams treat printing as a rounding error. It is not.
The problem is not that printing is expensive. It’s that the costs are scattered across four or five different budget lines – IT, facilities, supplies, and plain old employee time – so nobody ever sees the full number at once. This article breaks down exactly where that money goes, why so much of it is wasted, and what a practical audit looks like before you start making changes.
The Real Price Tag: What “Printing Costs” Actually Includes
Most managers think of printing costs as paper plus toner. That’s the visible layer. The real cost structure has three layers, and the one you can see is almost never the biggest.
Layer 1: Consumables. Paper, ink, and toner. These show up on invoices and feel controllable. They aren’t cheap – color toner cartridges alone can run well over $400 per printer per cycle once you factor in all four CMYK cartridges – but they’re also the most visible target for cost cutting.
Layer 2: Equipment and maintenance. Printers break. Maintenance contracts for mid-size offices regularly run into thousands of dollars per year, and that figure climbs fast when aging hardware starts throwing errors every other week. Most businesses don’t track the full cost of ownership on a per-device basis, which means they have no idea which machines are hemorrhaging money.
Layer 3: Labor and IT time. This is where things get genuinely painful. A meaningful portion of all internal IT help desk tickets are printer-related – driver conflicts, network errors, paper jams, toner alerts. Every one of those tickets pulls a skilled person away from work that actually matters. When you cost that out at an average IT salary, the math gets uncomfortable fast.
Add all three layers together for a 50-person company and you’re well past $36,000. For a 100-person organization, that baseline figure clears $72,000 before a single hour of wasted IT time is counted.
The Waste Problem Nobody Talks About
Printing costs would be easier to justify if most of what got printed actually served a purpose. A large share of it doesn’t.
70% of the total waste in offices is made up of paper, and as much as 30% of print jobs are never even picked up from the printer , according to data published by Formstack. Think about that for a second. Nearly one in three documents sent to the printer just sits there and eventually goes in the trash. That is not a behavior problem you can train away. It’s a structural outcome of unmanaged print environments where there’s no accountability tied to print actions.
It’s been estimated that 45% of paper printed in offices ends up trashed by the end of the day. So you’re buying paper, using toner, running the printer, and generating heat – and nearly half of all that activity produces exactly zero business value.
The environmental cost compounds the financial one. The share of paper in municipal solid waste by weight is 35% , according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s guidance on identifying greener paper. For companies with any kind of sustainability commitment, unmanaged printing is a direct contradiction of that message – and increasingly, stakeholders notice.
A Scenario That Makes This Concrete
Picture a regional accounting firm with 60 employees, 14 printers scattered across two floors, and no centralized print tracking. Nobody knows which devices get the heaviest use. Nobody knows the cost per page by department. Toner gets ordered reactively, which means someone is always either running out or over-ordering. The IT person fields three to four printer calls a week.
This firm’s total print spend, once all three layers are counted, runs somewhere between $43,000 and $58,000 per year. The partners think it’s around $12,000 because that’s what shows up in the supply budget. The gap between perceived cost and real cost is common and it’s the gap that a proper print audit closes.
The three-question audit this firm actually needs is simple: How many devices do we have and what does each one cost per page? How much print volume is going to waste? And who in the organization has visibility into print behavior right now? If the answer to the third question is “nobody,” the first two questions are unanswerable and the spend is uncontrolled.
The Environmental Ripple Effect
Beyond the budget, there’s a resource story worth understanding. The value of paper and cardboard lost to landfilling in 2019 was $4 billion, and associated landfilling fees amounted to almost $4 billion, according to a 2024 study published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That’s the national aggregate cost of throwing away a recoverable resource, and office printing is a direct contributor to it.
Smarter print environments reduce both the financial and environmental drag at once. Duplex printing defaults, pull-printing systems that require users to authenticate before a job releases, and right-sizing device fleets to actual usage patterns all cut paper consumption without asking employees to change much about how they work.
What a Controlled Print Environment Actually Looks Like
The companies that get this right aren’t necessarily spending less on printing. They’re spending predictably, with full visibility, on equipment that’s matched to their actual volume. That’s a very different problem than “we need to use less paper.”
Practically, a controlled print environment has four characteristics:
- Centralized tracking. Every print job is logged by device, user, and department. Cost allocation becomes possible. Waste becomes visible.
- Right-sized hardware. Device counts and capabilities match real usage data, not what seemed reasonable five years ago when the office layout was different.
- Proactive maintenance. Supplies are replenished on schedule, not when someone runs out and IT gets a frantic call at 8 a.m.
- Defined ownership. Someone is accountable for print spend the way someone is accountable for travel spend. Without ownership, nothing changes.
Getting those four things in place is exactly what a good managed print services provider does. The value isn’t just cost reduction – it’s converting an invisible, reactive expense into a visible, managed one. Most businesses find that visibility alone changes behavior at the departmental level, because departments that can see their own print costs tend to treat those costs differently.
Where to Start This Week
You don’t need a full audit to start making progress. Three moves this week get you most of the way there.
First, count your devices. Walk the floor and write down every printer, copier, and multifunction unit. Note the model and the rough age. You’ll almost certainly find devices you forgot existed.
Second, pull your supply invoices for the last 12 months. Add up what you spent on paper, toner, and ink. That’s your visible baseline. It will be higher than you expect.
Third, ask your IT team how many printer-related help desk tickets they handled last quarter. That number, priced at even a conservative hourly rate, often surprises people more than the supply budget does.
Those three numbers together give you a genuine starting point. From there, the question isn’t whether your print environment needs attention. It almost certainly does. The question is how quickly you want to stop paying for waste you can see.
| Cost Layer | Typical Visibility | Common Blind Spot |
|---|---|---|
| Consumables (paper, ink, toner) | High – usually invoiced | Over-ordering due to no usage data |
| Equipment and maintenance | Medium – service calls tracked inconsistently | True cost per device never calculated |
| IT labor (help desk tickets) | Low – rarely attributed to print budget | Skilled hours spent on toner alerts and jams |
| Wasted print jobs | None – no system to measure | Up to 30% of jobs never retrieved from printer |
“Reducing unnecessary expenditure on paper and ink, amounting to thousands of dollars per person each year, is imperative” – a sentiment echoed consistently in research on office resource management, and one that only gains force as hybrid work patterns make unmonitored print behavior harder to catch.
The printer in the corner of your office isn’t a problem. An unmanaged fleet of them, running on autopilot with no accountability and no usage data, absolutely is. The fix starts with deciding to look at the full number.
