What Does a Copier Lease Cost?

If you are looking for a copy machine, surely one of the first questions will be what does it cost. We are going to cover a lot of the pricing discussion here in this article as well as help you understand some important options when it comes to copier leasing.

Our company has thousands of copiers under contract with a lease, so we are able to answer this question as well as help you avoid some common pitfalls along the way.

By the end of this article, you will know what an office copier costs, and how copier dealers come up with the numbers you see on your copier proposal.

Leasing is a Financial Agreement

One of the first things to understand when leasing a copier or multifunction printer and thinking about costs is leasing is a financial contract generally between you and a bank. Leasing is not simply renting a copier to get service. When computing leasing costs, there is a term called a lease factor, given by the leasing company, which reps use to compute payments.

Basically, what this means is you take the amount to finance and then when you do there is a table that will give you a payment. The easiest way to see how this works is by using our handy lease rate calculator tool. This will help you understand what your copy machine should cost.

Once you see how this works, then you will get a lot better idea of how costs work with a copier lease. A $10,000 copier is about $200 on a 5-year lease and about $300 on a 3-year lease. Now you can start looking at your budget and actually figure out what kind of copier you should be considering.

For simplicity, we would say you should expect to spend at least $60 per month for a copier or multifunction printer lease, and depending on features, most companies will not exceed $200 per month. The more you go to a production copier, the more you will exceed the $200.

Supplies and Service

The cost of the copier is not merely the copier itself. There is also a part which is the supplies and service cost. Think of this like your gas for your car. This will matter more if you drive more using the car analogy. So, the more you print, the more this matters. If you barely print at all, this will be much less important to you.

A good average for black and white is 1.5 cents a page. For color, 8 cents a page is a good average. The really cheap copiers will cost more per print and the nicer ones will be less per print. This is simply a matter of multiplying the numbers out to see what makes the most sense when added to the monthly equipment costs.

You may wonder why you have to pay for maintenance when you have already leased the copy machine. The idea here is when you lease, you have access to the copier or multifunction printer. Once you have access, you need toner, drums, fusers, and technicians – but all of this is variable. Meaning what you print will be different than what the company down the street does on their copier. If you have a small multifunction printer and they have a huge production copier, the number of prints could be different by a factor of 10X or even 100X. So, most copier dealers charge per print so the person who has the office equipment is the one who pays for the prints that copy machine printed.

So, using the above, there are 2 factors you need to be aware of. The cost of the copier lease for the printer itself, and the cost of the supplies to allow the printer or copier to run. In our experience, an average office will spend about $150 on the copier and about $100 per month on the copy machine maintenance. Now, there are many companies that can have what they need for under $100 total and there are others that spend up to $1000 or more. The print volume is the big key when it comes to the cost of an office copier because it determines how much the supplies portion will cost as well as what copier is needed in the first place.

If you are wanting to know the cost of a commercial copy machine and want an exact quote, let us know or get our Instant Quote found at the side and top right of this page. We would love to help you get information about what an office copy machine costs.