Page Yield Calculator

Find the real page yield of a cartridge at your coverage.

What you provide

ISO/IEC 24711 uses 5%. Almost every cartridge is rated this way.

Plain text is about 5%. Text with headers and tables is 10% to 15%. Pages with graphics go far higher.

Result

About 1,000 pages, or $0.060 a page

Every yield figure on a box is measured at 5% page coverage under ISO/IEC 24711, which is roughly a page of double-spaced text with nothing else on it. Real documents with headers, tables or a logo run at 10% to 15%, and anything with a chart or a photograph goes far higher, which is why a cartridge rated for 2,000 pages routinely delivers half that. The standard is not dishonest, it is just measuring something specific. Compare printers on cost per page at your own coverage rather than on cartridge price, since the cheap printer with expensive consumables is the oldest arrangement in the industry.

Diagnostic telemetry
Rated yieldAt the standard 5% coverage
2,000 pages
Your coverage
10%
Realistic yield
1,000 pages
Cost per page
$0.0600
Cartridge lasts
3.3 months
Cartridges a year
3.6
Annual consumable cost
$216.00

What this cannot tell you

  • Arithmetic on the figures you enter. It cannot read your printer or measure the coverage of your documents.
  • Yield also depends on print quality settings, on how often the printer runs cleaning cycles, and on the amount of toner or ink a cartridge is shipped with, none of which are in this calculation.

Take this with you

Page Yield Calculator on RunTheTests — free browser-based printer tools, no sign-up.