That gap is the problem. Office printing costs are one of the most consistently underestimated operating expenses in business — and the ones flying under the radar are often the most expensive. This post breaks down what printing actually costs, where the hidden expenses live, and what you can do to finally get a clear picture.
The average employee costs their employer approximately $725 per year in printing-related expenses. That figure includes paper, ink, toner, and basic supply and equipment costs — but it does not include the costs that rarely appear on any invoice labeled “printing.”
For a 50-person company, that baseline math alone lands at over $36,000 annually. For a 100-person organization, it’s more than $72,000 before a single hidden cost enters the picture.
Industry benchmarks show that printing and document-related expenses typically account for 1% to 3% of a company’s total annual revenue, making print the third-highest operating expense for many organizations after rent and payroll. Most leadership teams don’t categorize it that way — and that’s precisely why it keeps growing unchecked.
The toner orders and lease payments are just the surface. The costs that actually drive total print spend higher are the ones distributed across IT budgets, facilities, energy bills, and employee time — never labeled “printing” on any report.
Nearly 23% of all internal help desk calls are printer-related. That’s almost one in four support tickets consuming skilled IT staff time on connectivity errors, driver conflicts, paper jams, and toner alerts. Every one of those calls pulls your team away from work that actually moves the business forward.
Between 45% and 65% of all printed pages end up as waste — documents printed and never picked up, jobs sent twice, pages discarded immediately after printing. That’s not an edge case. It’s a structural cost built into most unmanaged print environments, and it compounds silently over time.
A standard office copier can cost between $800 and $1,500 per year in electricity alone, assuming regular use. Older devices with no power management features sit at the high end of that range. Multiply that across a multi-device fleet, and energy becomes a material line item that rarely gets attributed to printing.
When a printer fails during a deadline-sensitive workflow, the cost isn’t just the service call. It’s the delayed output, the staff scrambling for a workaround, and the downstream impact on clients or internal teams. These productivity losses are real but almost never show up on a print-related expense report.
Print spending is fragmented by design. Toner gets ordered on a corporate card. Paper runs through facilities. Repairs go through IT or operations. Equipment leases live in finance. No single person owns the full picture, so no single report ever shows it.
That’s not poor management — it’s the natural result of how most print environments were built: one printer at a time, managed reactively, with costs absorbed wherever they landed. Print management software can consolidate usage data and surface the full picture, but most unmanaged environments don’t have it in place, which means the spending continues without visibility.
A managed print assessment is the most reliable way to understand what your office is actually spending on printing. Rather than estimating, it captures a full month of usage data across every device on your network — what’s being printed, what’s being wasted, and where the largest cost drivers are.
Most businesses that go through a formal assessment discover 20% to 30% in savings they weren’t aware were available. Common findings include oversized devices running underload, redundant hardware that could be consolidated, color print volumes that could be restricted, and supply spend that could be automated at a fraction of the retail cost.
Print Image Solutions’ managed print services start with a 30-day print fleet assessment at no cost, giving your team a data-backed picture of your environment before any commitment is made.
Most companies don’t know their true print spend until they see the numbers side by side. A free print assessment from Print Image Solutions inventories your full fleet, captures real usage data, and shows you exactly where the savings are. No obligation. No guesswork. Just clarity on a cost most businesses have never fully measured.Button Schedule Your Free Assessment
Managed print services address the total cost of your print environment — not just the supply line. Under a managed print agreement, toner replenishment is automated, maintenance is handled proactively, repairs are covered, and fleet performance is monitored continuously. Everything rolls into one predictable monthly invoice instead of scattered, reactive expenses.
Businesses that move from unmanaged to managed print typically see cost reductions of 30% or more within the first year, along with measurable drops in IT support volume, fewer device-related disruptions, and a fleet that’s right-sized for actual usage rather than historical habit.
You can’t reduce a cost you can’t see. Printing tends to persist as an untracked expense not because businesses don’t care, but because the costs are distributed across departments, absorbed into unrelated budgets, and never measured in one place.
The first step isn’t a major overhaul. It’s getting an accurate picture of what your print environment actually costs today — and understanding where a managed approach would change that number. Reach out to Print Image Solutions to schedule a free print assessment and find out what your office is really spending on printing.
https://printimagesolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Why-More-Printers-Dont-Mean-Better-Printing.jpg 1250 2000 Abstrakt Marketing /wp-content/uploads/2026/03/PIS-Black.png Abstrakt Marketing2026-06-22 13:09:282026-06-22 13:09:34Print Fleet Right-Sizing: Why More Printers Don’t Mean Better Printing
Print Fleet Right-Sizing: Why More Printers Don’t Mean Better Printin...