Duty cycle is a part of every printer specification, and it’s often discussed as one of the main criteria you should use when deciding which printer to buy. Many buyer’s guides will tell you quite plainly that duty cycle reports the workload a printer is designed to handle. However, when you read that the mid-range printer you’ve been considering has a duty cycle of 200,000 pages per month, you might wonder what’s going on. Either you’ve been shopping for more printer power than you really need or that number is fishy.

There are two shopping rules relating to duty cycle:

1. Don’t expect your estimated (or actual) monthly print volume to match the duty cycle of your appropriate printer.
2. Don’t compare one vendor’s duty cycle to another vendor’s duty cycle.

Why Duty Cycle Is Confusing

If you’ve browsed several printer models you’ll know that the stated duty cycle for a given printer is a rather big number, tens or hundreds of thousands of pages per month. The vendors will tell you that a printer's duty cycle represents the amount of use the printer is designed to handle, measured in "maximum" pages printed per month. The cheapest laser models promise 8,000 pages per month and a typical workgroup printer may claim a 250,000-page monthly limit.