How much is paper costing your business every year?
- Enter your monthly printing volume, per-page cost, storage, and retrieval time
- See the total annual cost of paper-based workflows calculated in real time
- Compare against a digital alternative and see your savings plus environmental impact
Proof: The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year. At $0.08/page, that is $800 per person before storage and retrieval costs.
Paper-based document workflows cost businesses thousands of dollars annually in printing, storage, and retrieval labor. Use this calculator to quantify the exact cost and see how much you could save by going digital.
- An office printing 2,000 pages per month at $0.08/page with $100/month storage and 8 hours of retrieval at $35/hour spends over $6,240 per year on paper workflows.
- The same workflows handled digitally with cloud storage and renamed.to cost $948 per year, saving over $5,200 annually.
- Going paperless also saves nearly 3 trees and avoids 144 kg of CO2 emissions per year at that volume.
Free, no signup, and all calculations happen in your browser.
Printing, filing cabinets, and time spent hunting for physical documents add up to a significant hidden expense. Most businesses have never totaled these costs because they are spread across departments and buried in routine. This calculator makes the full picture visible.
Adjust the sliders to match your organization. Results update instantly.
Savings calculator
Enter your numbers below. All calculations happen instantly in your browser.
Your paper costs
Annual savings by going digital
$5,826
$29,130 over 5 years
$1,920
24,000 pages/year
$1,200
$100/mo physical storage
$3,360
96 hours/year
$6,480
Printing + storage + labor
$654
$50/mo storage + $5/mo renamed.to
2.9 trees
144 kg CO2 avoided/year
Annual cost comparison
Environmental impact of going paperless
2.9
trees saved per year
144 kg
CO2 emissions avoided per year
Based on ~8,333 pages per tree and 0.006 kg CO2 per printed page.
Why this matters
The costs of paper go far beyond the price of a ream. Here is what most organizations overlook when they stick with physical documents.
Environmental impact
The average office worker consumes the equivalent of one tree per year in paper. Multiply that across your team and the environmental cost is substantial. Going paperless eliminates tree consumption, reduces CO2 emissions, and cuts waste sent to landfill.
Retrieval speed
Finding a physical document in a filing cabinet takes an average of 12 minutes. Finding a digital document with search takes seconds. Over a month of retrieval tasks, that difference adds up to days of recovered productivity.
Disaster recovery
Paper documents are vulnerable to fire, flood, theft, and simple misfiling. Once lost, they are gone. Digital documents backed up to the cloud are automatically protected with redundancy, versioning, and access controls that paper can never match.
Go paperless without the chaos. Renamed.to automatically organizes your digital files so the transition is seamless.
50 free renames, no credit card required.
Frequently asked questions
How much does paper cost a typical office per year?
A typical office printing 2,000 pages per month at $0.08 per page spends about $1,920 per year on printing alone. When you add physical storage costs and the labor time spent filing and retrieving documents, the total often exceeds $6,000 per year. Larger organizations printing 10,000 or more pages monthly can spend tens of thousands annually.
What does a digital alternative cost?
A typical digital setup costs about $948 per year: $50 per month for business cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox, plus $29 per month for renamed.to to automatically organize and rename your digital files. This replaces printing, physical storage, and most manual retrieval time.
What is the environmental impact of going paperless?
One tree produces approximately 8,333 sheets of paper. An office printing 2,000 pages per month uses the equivalent of nearly 3 trees per year. Each printed page also generates about 0.006 kg of CO2 when you account for paper production, printing, and transport. Going paperless eliminates both the tree consumption and the associated carbon emissions.
How long does it take to go paperless?
Most small to mid-size businesses can transition their active workflows to digital in 2 to 4 weeks. This includes setting up cloud storage, establishing digital naming conventions, and training staff on the new process. Back-scanning of existing paper archives can run in parallel and typically takes 1 to 3 months depending on volume.
Can I share these results with my team?
Yes. Adjust the sliders to match your organization, then take a screenshot or share the page URL. The calculator runs entirely in your browser with no data sent to any server, so you can share the link and have others enter their own numbers to compare.
Related resources
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