How Much Does It Cost to Lease a Copier or Printer?

The short answer: a copier or printer lease payment is set by four things. The class of machine, which follows how many pages your office prints a month. The term, from 12 to 60 months. The lease type, fair market value or $1 buyout. And whether service is folded into the payment or billed separately per page. Every dealer’s quote is some mix of those four, and the mix matters more than the headline number.

This post explains each one so you can read any quote, including ours, and see what you are paying for. We do not publish our rates here. We keep one rate sheet, the same for every office, and send it on request through the office printer lease page.

1. The machine follows your page count, not your headcount

Commercial machines are sized by monthly volume: low volume, low to medium volume, and medium to high volume. A low volume machine is compact and prints letter and legal. A low to medium volume machine, which is what most offices run, adds four paper drawers up to 12×18 and a finisher. A medium to high volume machine is the same body at a faster speed. The lease payment climbs with each class, so the single most expensive mistake in a copier lease is paying for a class you do not print into.

The tell is your meter. Most offices believe they print far more color than they do, and the counter says otherwise. Before you take any quote, read the meter on your current machine for black and white and color separately. That number should decide the machine. Not a salesperson’s guess, and not yours.

2. The term spreads the same machine over more or fewer months

Terms run 12, 24, 36, 48 or 60 months. A longer term means a lower monthly payment on the same machine, and a longer commitment to it. Thirty-six months is the most common term because it lines up with how long a machine stays current. Sixty months buys the lowest payment and leaves you on a five-year-old machine at the end.

One thing no term changes: a lease runs its full length. You cannot cancel it in the middle without paying the remaining payments. That is true of every dealer’s lease, which is why the term you choose is the decision to slow down on.

3. Fair market value or $1 buyout

A fair market value lease has the lower payment. At the end you return the machine, buy it at its then-current value, or move onto a newer one. A $1 buyout lease has a higher payment because you are paying the machine off, and at the end you own it for one dollar. If you plan to keep a machine for eight years, the $1 buyout is the cheaper path in total. If you want a current machine every three years, fair market value is. Our guide on buying a copier outright covers the third option.

4. Service is the number that actually moves

Toner, parts, labor and service calls are billed either inside the lease payment or as a separate per-page agreement. The per-page structure is where most of the surprises in a copier bill live, so read these three lines before you compare anything:

• The allotment. Many agreements bill you for a fixed block of pages every month. Print under it and nothing comes back. Print over it and every extra page bills at a penalty rate above your normal rate. The block was set from a guess made before the machine was installed and it is locked for the whole term.
• The escalator. One sentence in the terms that raises the payment every year on a schedule you agreed to when you signed. The machine does not get faster. The number goes up.
• The renewal clause. Unless you send written notice inside a window, usually 90 to 150 days before the end, the whole agreement renews, often for another twelve months. Telling your rep does not count. The notice goes in writing to the leasing company named in the paperwork, which is usually not the dealer.

Two smaller lines add up as well: a documentation fee on the first invoice, and a security deposit. Both vary by dealer and both belong on the quote, not in the fine print. Our before you lease or buy page walks through a marked-up contract page so you can see where each clause sits.

How the four combine on a quote

Dealers package the four levers in a few standard ways. A flat plan bundles the machine, the service and a block of pages into one monthly number, which is easiest to budget. A pay-per-print plan takes a lower lease payment and bills the pages you actually print at one published rate. A purchase trades the monthly payment for one price up front, with service billed the same per-page way. A month-to-month rental costs more per month than a lease because there is no term at all. We offer all four, and the names we use are the Turnkey Plan, Pay-Per-Print, purchase and monthly rental.

When you compare two quotes, line them up on the same machine class, the same term, the same lease type, and the same page count. If a dealer will not put all four on paper, the low number on their first page is not the number you will pay.

What to do in the next ten minutes

Pull your last three copier invoices and put them side by side. If the totals do not match, find the line that changed. That is your allotment doing its job. Then open your current lease and search for the words renewal, escalation and minimum. Put the renewal window on your calendar with a 30-day reminder.

If you cannot find them, send us page one of your current lease. We will tell you when it ends, what the notice window is, and what leaving would cost. No obligation. And if you want our rate sheet for Dallas Fort Worth, Houston, Austin or San Antonio, ask through the quote page and it goes out the same day.