Overage/Underage in Printing Industry

From the perspective of the offset printer, producing a particular quantity of printed pieces is not an exact science. For one thing, a printing press is not like a light switch. It cannot be turned on and off to print exactly 50,000 copies, so the printer almost always either prints too few or too many copies.
In addition, there are many different manufacturing activities within the production process. For instance, one side of a press sheet is printed, then the other side is printed after the first dries. Once the presswork is complete, the printed press sheets are transferred to post-press for trimming, folding, collating, stitching, etc.
Ink-jet addressing and other lettershop activities may follow. In the course of each production task, printed sheets are wasted. This waste is called spoilage. To eventually hand off to the client a completed press run of 50,000 copies of a publication, a printer must start with many more copies, assuming he will destroy a certain number in each step as part of the manufacturing process.
Within the printing industry, a membership organization of printers called the PIFSA has developed a series of trade customs.
Among these is a standard for overage/underage. This is the terminology for the copies of your publication that exceed or fall short of your requested press run.
According to these trade customs, a printer charges a customer for the actual number of copies produced, up to 10 percent more or less than the requested amount. The key here is the word “actual.” This is not an arbitrary number. The printer can only charge for what he hands off to the customer.
There are a few “rules” that expand upon/modify this trade custom:
1. Less overage/underage can be expected for longer runs. Another way to say this is that by their very nature, longer runs tend to be more accurate, with the necessary allowance for spoilage being a smaller percentage of the entire run. For instance, you might expect 3 percent overage within a 100,000-copy press run.
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2. You can negotiate overage/underage limits with your printer. A printer I once worked with agreed to charge for only 2.5 percent overage/underage. However, this was for a weekly magazine. The printer and client had a contract and a long history of working together.
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3. You can request “not less than” 50,000 copies (or any other number), as well. However, to guarantee that you will receive not less than 50,000 copies, the printer can provide (and charge for) up to double the usual amount, twenty percent more (in this case 60,000 rather than 55,000 copies on a 50,000 press run). In this case, the printer makes sure that far more copies than needed are produced to ensure that not even 10 copies fewer than the requested limit are handed to the client.
When in doubt, talk to your print provider.