Best Printer Under $100 (October 2026)

The business model, stated plainly

A printer is one of the few products where the purchase price tells you almost nothing about what it costs. Manufacturers sell entry-level hardware at or near cost and make their margin on cartridges, which is why a $59 all-in-one can ship with starter cartridges that cost $45 to replace.

This changes how you should shop. The number to compare is cost per page, and across the whole category it varies by roughly an order of magnitude: a few cents a page on a monochrome laser, up to twenty or thirty cents a page on a cheap inkjet using standard-yield cartridges.

Work out roughly how many pages you print a month, multiply by the cost per page, and multiply by twenty-four. That number, plus the purchase price, is what the printer actually costs. For a household printing a hundred pages a month, the laser is cheaper by a wide margin before the second year is out.

Two other costs are easy to miss: subscription ink programs, which are genuinely good value at high volume and poor value at low volume, and dried-up cartridges, which is a real and recurring cost for infrequent inkjet users.

Laser or inkjet - decide this first

Everything else follows from this choice, and most people choose wrong.

Buy a laser if you mostly print text - school forms, shipping labels, tax documents, recipes, tickets. Toner is a dry powder, so it does not dry out between jobs, a cartridge lasts hundreds or thousands of pages, and the text is crisper than inkjet text. The classic failure mode of household printing - needing one page urgently and finding the cartridge dried solid - simply does not happen.

Buy an inkjet if you need color, print photos, or print so rarely that per-page cost is irrelevant and purchase price is everything. Inkjets are also physically smaller and quieter.

Consider a refillable-tank inkjet if you print a lot of color. The machines cost more than $100, but the ink cost per page is dramatically lower, and if your volume is high the payback is quick.

The honest summary: most homes think they need color and print black text. A monochrome laser is the pick for the majority.

• Cost per page is the real spec. Everything else is secondary.
• Toner does not dry out. Ink does, and that is a recurring cost if you print rarely.
• Duplex (two-sided) printing halves your paper cost - check whether it is automatic or manual.
• Check the cartridge price before you buy the printer. Not after.

Cost per page, worked through

The arithmetic is what makes this decision obvious, so here is how to do it for any printer you are looking at, with numbers you can check on the listing yourself.

Find the cartridge price and its rated page yield. Both are published. Divide the price by the yield and you have cost per page. Do it for the high-yield cartridge too, because that is usually the one you should actually buy.

Multiply by your real monthly volume. Not your aspirational volume - look at how much paper you have actually bought in the last year.

Multiply by 24 for a two-year cost, and add the purchase price.

Run that for a cheap inkjet and a cheap mono laser at a hundred pages a month and the laser wins well before the end of year one, even though it costs more to buy. Run it at ten pages a month and the inkjet wins, because almost nothing is being spent on consumables either way.

That is the whole decision. Everything else - app quality, design, scan resolution - is a tiebreaker.

If you are still weighing the two technologies rather than individual models, inkjet vs laser printer for home use runs the same arithmetic across all three options, including refillable-tank inkjets.

Things that quietly cost you money

Manual duplex. If the printer cannot print both sides automatically, you will print single-sided, and your paper cost doubles. Automatic duplex is worth hunting for.

Starter cartridges. The cartridges in the box are frequently partially filled. The first replacement comes sooner than you expect, and that is by design.

Cleaning cycles. An inkjet that sits idle runs head-cleaning routines that consume ink you never printed with. Print something every couple of weeks or accept the loss.

Firmware that rejects third-party cartridges. This is a real and changing situation across brands. If buying third-party consumables is part of your plan, check the current state for the specific model before committing.

Color cartridges used for black printing. Some inkjets mix color ink into composite black, or refuse to print at all when one color runs out. Worth knowing in advance.

How we picked

We ranked on two-year total cost of ownership rather than purchase price, using published cartridge prices and manufacturer page-yield ratings, and we only included machines currently sold in the US with a street price under $100.

Two of the five entries are deliberately not a new consumer printer, because for a meaningful share of households a refurbished office laser or no printer at all is the better answer. Recommending a $59 inkjet to someone who prints three pages a month would make us money and cost them money.

We have not tested print quality in a lab and make no claim to. Our method is on how we pick, and the related guides below cover the other side of the home-office setup.