Most print budgets get approved without much scrutiny. Nobody can point to one number that shows what unmanaged printing costs. That’s changing. Procurement teams evaluating managed print services in 2026 are pulling from a growing body of data. That data covers cost per employee, help desk burden, and fleet efficiency. Teams use it to build a business case, the way they would for any other capital decision.
One widely referenced source pulls this data together. It’s Standley Systems’ managed print services statistics and trends page. The page compiles figures from IDC, Gartner, and Quocirca. Procurement teams use those figures as a starting point when building their own numbers. Here’s what the data actually says. A business leader can use it to decide if an MPS program is worth the switch.
What Unmanaged Printing Costs per Employee
Industry analysts commonly cite a range for office printing costs. It runs between 1 and 3 percent of a company’s annual revenue. IDC has published this range in its print services research for years. A typical office employee prints around 10,000 pages a year. That works out to roughly $700 per employee per year. The total factors are paper, toner, energy, and device costs. Multiply that across an office of 50 people. Unmanaged print spend lands around $35,000 a year. Most of that spending is scattered across departmental budgets, and yet, no single line item tracks it.
That scattering is the real problem for finance teams. A printer purchase might show up as a capital expense. Toner might appear as an office supply line. Service calls often land as an IT support cost. Nobody is responsible for adding these together. Gartner has noted that many organizations cannot accurately report how many printers they own. They also can’t say what those devices cost to operate each month. When a CFO finally does the math, the number is usually higher than expected. Print costs did not spike. They were simply never consolidated into one view.
Print Related Help Desk Tickets
For IT directors, the more persuasive number is often not the print spend itself. It’s the labor cost sitting behind it. Gartner research puts the share of help desk tickets related to printers at around 40 percent. Print vendors, including CDW cite this figure widely. That figure covers paper jams, driver issues, toner replacement requests, and connectivity problems. In most offices, nobody actually owns responsibility for these devices.
Technical staff time costs $75 to $100 an hour. Even a modest volume of print-related tickets adds up to a real budget. An IT team spending ten hours a month on printer troubleshooting faces real costs. That adds up to $9,000 to $12,000 a year in labor. That money could otherwise go toward projects that move the business forward. This argument tends to land hardest with CTOs and IT directors evaluating MPS. It reframes the print environment as an IT staffing cost, not just a facilities cost. That cost shows up in headcount planning whether anyone labels it that way or not.
Gartner has also pointed to a related inefficiency. The average office has about 4 employees per printer. Analysts consider a ratio closer to 10 employees per printer efficient for a properly managed fleet. That gap is where a lot of the help desk burden originates. More devices mean more points of failure, more supply orders, and more service calls. This holds even when total print volume stays flat.
How MPS Programs Reduce Consumable Spend
Consumables, meaning toner, ink, and paper, are usually where an MPS program shows the fastest and most visible savings. Multiple industry sources place typical first-year cost reductions from MPS adoption in the 20 to 30 percent range. Quocirca’s Global Print research is one of them. That reduction comes from three sources working together rather than any single lever.
The first is volume pricing. An MPS provider buys supplies across hundreds of client accounts. That volume secures pricing an individual business cannot negotiate alone. The second is automated replenishment. It eliminates the retail markup that comes from ordering toner in a panic after a device runs dry midweek.
The third is print policy enforcement. Examples include default duplex printing and color quotas for roles that don’t generate revenue. Another example is pull print release, which requires a badge or PIN before a job reaches the tray. Analysts have found that policy enforcement alone can reduce total print volume by 15 to 20 percent. This is separate from savings tied to pricing and replenishment. It works by removing the default of printing everything without friction.
How Resizing the Print Fleet Affects Device Count and Total Cost of Ownership
The most substantial savings over time usually come from resizing the fleet itself. They don’t come from managing the existing fleet more efficiently. An MPS assessment typically starts with an audit of every device in the environment. That includes devices nobody remembers ordering. The audit then maps actual usage against capacity. The result is often a fleet that looks nothing like the one a company started with.
A commonly cited industry example involves consolidating a fleet from around 22 devices down to 12. Total annual print costs drop by roughly 30 percent in that process. The mechanics are straightforward. Underused devices in areas with little traffic get eliminated. Multifunction devices replace standalone printers, copiers, and scanners scattered across departments. Devices placed for convenience rather than actual demand get repositioned or removed. None of this requires new technology. It requires data on how the existing fleet is actually used. That data is exactly what most companies lack before an MPS audit.
The total cost of ownership calculation matters more than the sticker price of any individual device. A cheaper printer can still cost more over three years. This happens if it requires more frequent service calls. It also happens if it burns through proprietary toner faster or sits idle most of the day. A slightly pricier device matched correctly to its workload often costs less in the long run. This is the hardest part of the MPS pitch to communicate in a single number. The reason is that it depends on matching device capability to actual usage. It isn’t about defaulting to whatever the previous vendor happened to sell.
What This Means for A 2026 Procurement Decision
None of these figures are a guarantee. Actual savings depend heavily on how disorganized the starting fleet is. They also depend on how disciplined the organization is about enforcing new print policies. A third factor is how honest the initial audit is about device usage. A company that already resized its fleet five years ago will see smaller gains. This is true if it never lets the fleet sprawl again. Compare that to a company that has added printers without a plan for a decade. Nobody tracked the total in that case.
The decision framework that tends to hold up under scrutiny is simple. Start with an actual device and cost audit rather than an estimate. Most of the savings potential depends on how far the current environment is from an efficient baseline. Separate consumable savings from labor savings when building the business case. Finance and IT stakeholders respond to different parts of the number. Treat the first-year reduction figures as a starting range, not a promise. Then hold the MPS provider accountable for hitting them. Ask for actual reporting, not a projection made during the sales process.
