Copier lease cost calculator

Your monthly payment is not what your copier costs. Enter the numbers off your own invoice and this works out the rest — the all-in cost per page, what overage is really costing you, and what the remainder of your term adds up to at the volumes you actually print.

This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and you don’t have to give me your details to use it.

How to work it out yourself

Three lines of arithmetic, in this order:

1. Overage = (pages printed − pages included) × the overage rate, done separately for black-and-white and for colour. Pages you don’t print don’t carry over.
2. True monthly cost = base lease payment + any separate service charge + overage.
3. All-in cost per page = true monthly cost ÷ total pages printed. This is the number to compare between vendors, and the one you are almost never quoted.

A worked example

A mid-size office with a colour multifunction. Base payment$289.00 a month, 34months left on the term. The plan includes 5,000black-and-white pages and 500 colour pages a month, with overage at 1.20¢ and8.90¢ respectively. They actually print7,400 black-and-white and2,100 colour.

The office in this example budgeted $289.00 a month and is paying $460.20.37% of the bill is overage— $171.20 a month that never appeared on the quote, and $5,820.80 across the remaining term. Colour is doing most of the damage: 1,600pages at 8.90¢ costs more than four times the black-and-white overage on roughly a quarter of the volume.

Run it on your own numbers

Nothing is pre-filled — the greyed figures are just the example above, and they never enter the arithmetic. The first three fields are enough for a real number. Base payment, service charge and pages this month are all on your invoice. The included-page allowance and the overage rate live on the lease schedule, and they only add detail.

What the number usually tells you

If overage is more than about a fifth of the bill

The plan was sized for a different office than the one you have now. That is worth fixing, but note that the fix is usually a renegotiated allowance rather than new hardware — a vendor who responds to this by quoting you a new machine is answering a question you didn’t ask.

If you’re well under your included pages

You are paying for an allowance you don’t use, and unused pages almost never roll over. It is the quieter version of the same problem: the money is gone either way, it just never appears as an overage line.

If colour is a small share of pages but a large share of cost

Colour clicks commonly run several times the black-and-white rate, so a modest colour habit can dominate the bill. Often the answer is routing default printing to black-and-white rather than changing anything about the contract.

Separately worth checking today:the notice deadline on your term. It is set by the notice clause, not by the end date, and missing it renews the agreement automatically.

Two things this calculator can’t see

Escalators. Many agreements raise the base payment or the click rates annually, so the remaining-term figure above may be optimistic. Check the schedule for an annual increase clause.

End-of-term costs. Return freight, de-installation, and condition penalties usually aren’t in the monthly figure at all. On a fair-market-value lease there may also be a buyout to negotiate. Those are the surprises worth knowing about long before the term ends.

One New Jersey detail while you have the invoice out: the state sales tax rate is 6.625%, and on a lease of more than six months New Jersey requires the lessor to collect the full tax up front rather than monthly. If a quote shows a flat 6%, someone has used another state’s number.