How much does a 3D printer cost to run per hour?
About 25p an hour for a typical £700 printer, before filament. Most people expect that to be mostly electricity. It is the smallest of the three parts.
| Per hour of printing | Typical | Worked out from |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 3p | 120W average draw at 25p per kWh |
| Wear parts | 8p | Nozzles, hotend, belts, build plate |
| The machine itself | 14p | £700 spread over 5,000 printing hours |
| Total | 25p | Filament is on top of this |
Your own figure moves with the printer’s price and how long you expect it to last. Each line is worked through below, and the cost calculator does it with your numbers.
Electricity
Printer wattage × hours × your unit rate. The trap is using the number on the label: a printer rated at 350W does not draw 350W throughout. The bed heats hard at the start and then cycles, and the hotend is a fraction of the total. Average draw over a long print is commonly a third to a half of the plate rating.
A five-hour print averaging 120W at 25p per kWh is 0.6 kWh — around 15p. Running eight hours a day, every day, at that rate is roughly £2 a week.
Which is the point: for one print it is a rounding error, and over a year it is real but not frightening. If you want it exact, a plug-in energy monitor costs less than a reel of filament and removes the guesswork permanently.
Wear parts
These costs feel like bad luck, but they come round fairly regularly. Nozzles wear, and abrasives like carbon-fibre or glow-in-the-dark filament wear them fast enough that a hardened nozzle stops being optional. Hotends clog. Belts stretch. Build surfaces stop gripping. Fans fail.
Each one is small, but together they are a steady cost of making things, not bad luck. Divide the yearly total by the hours you actually print and carry it as a per-hour figure, so it turns up in your pricing before the part fails rather than after.
The machine itself
Almost nobody includes this cost, and it is usually the biggest.
A £700 printer that gives you 5,000 productive hours costs 14p an hour before a single consumable. On a five-hour print that is 70p — several times the electricity. Leave it out and the printer seems free until it dies. Then replacing it feels like a disaster, when your prices should already have paid for it.
Count "productive hours" carefully. It means the hours the printer spent printing things you could sell, not the hours since you bought it. A machine that prints ten hours a week takes about ten years to reach 5,000 hours. It probably won't last that long, so the hourly figure should be higher.
Putting it together
A five-hour print on a £700 machine, 120W average, 25p/kWh:
- Electricity — 15p
- Depreciation at 14p/hour — 70p
- Wear parts at roughly 8p/hour — 40p
About £1.25 in machine cost, of which electricity — the part people ask about — is around one part in eight.
Add filament, add the waste that never became a part, then divide by (1 − your failure rate). That is your floor. The full cost breakdown works through it end to end.
What this changes
Mostly it changes which jobs are worth taking. A long print of a cheap item is the one that looks fine on filament cost and stops making sense once machine time is priced. Sellers who carry these numbers tend to drift toward shorter prints, higher-value items, or batching plates — because once the numbers are in front of them, it is the obvious thing to do.
MakerProof carries printer wattage and machine cost per hour as settings, so every print you log is costed with them included rather than as filament plus a guess. Start free.