CUTTING PAPER - COUNTING - Storage Examples
   

 A Federal Estimate of Storage Costs

The National Archives and Records Administration is a rare organization that has managing office paper as one of its primary missions.  NARA estimates the cost for storing paper in ordinary offices and in warehouse-like "Federal Records Centers".  The following data are from 1996.

U.S. records management professionals measure storage in cubic feet (ft3).  A cubic foot of paper records is approximately a stack of paper a foot high or one foot of a file cabinet drawer.  For office space, a cubic foot of records was estimated to cost $23.24, about 98% of which is the rental cost of the office space.  For the Records Center, the cost was $1.56/ft3.  In both cases, that is only the cost of leaving the records in place for many years.  The cost of employee time to prepare the records for storage, access them as needed, and determine when they can be disposed of is usually much larger. 

Estimated Costs for 168 ft3 of records

  Office  Records Center 
Storage Method 5-drawer letter-size
file cabinet		 14 shelf high
shelving unit
Cabinet/Shelf Purchase Cost $20.50/ft3 $5.19/ft3
Annual cost over 40 year life $0.51/ft3 $0.13/ft3
Floor Area Needed 168 ft2 30 ft2
Floor Area Cost $22.73/ft2 $7.14/ft2
Storage  Ratio 1 ft3/ft2 5 ft3/ft2
Rent per cubic foot of storage $22.73/ft3 $1.43/ft3
Total Cost $23.24/ft3 $1.56/ft3
 

Source: NARA "Memorandum to Agency Records Offices and Information Resource Managers: Cost Savings in Federal Records Centers Storage" by James Moore, Assistant Archivist for Records Administration, NI 30.96, December 1995.
 

One estimate puts labor as three times the space cost (source: Sharp, Inc. citing Association of Information Systems Professionals).
 
    Disposal