Single-Sided vs Dual-Sided ID Cards

Dual-sided printing costs more, both for the printer and for every card it produces. Whether that is money well spent depends almost entirely on whether you have anything worth putting on the back. If you are choosing a printer more broadly, our guide to choosing an ID card printer covers the wider decision.

What actually goes on the back of a card

Most organizations that dismiss dual-sided printing have not thought about what the second side would carry. In practice it fills up quickly.

A barcode or QR code. Putting it on the back keeps the front clean and gives the code the space it needs to scan reliably at a small size.

Terms of use and return instructions. "This card remains the property of..." and a return address. Genuinely useful on a lost card, and it costs nothing to print.

Emergency and contact information. A security number, a facilities line, or a 24-hour contact.

Policy text. Anything legal or procedural that has to be on the card but should not be shouting from the front.

Practical detail. Opening hours for a club, a booking web address, a member number, a shift or department code.

If you find yourself cramming three of those onto the front of a card in six point type, you have already answered the question.

What it costs

There are two costs and they behave differently.

The printer costs more, and how much more depends on the model. Some are sold as separate single and dual-sided versions. Others are single-sided machines with a dual-sided module that can be fitted later, sometimes in the field and sometimes only at the factory.

The consumable cost depends on how you print the second side. This is where people get caught out.

If the back of your card is black text and a barcode, a YMCKOK ribbon prints both sides from one set of panels. The card costs the same as a single-sided card from a YMCKO ribbon of the same yield. Effectively the second side is free.

If you print the back in full color from a YMCKO ribbon, the printer uses two sets of panels per card and your yield halves. A 300-print ribbon becomes 150 dual-sided cards, and your cost per card doubles.

So the sensible design is color on the front, resin black on the back. Our ribbon compatibility and yield guide explains the panel letters and lists the yields.

Buy it now or add it later

This is the decision that costs people money, and it is worth getting right at purchase.

Some printers can be upgraded from single to dual-sided after the fact. On those, waiting is a reasonable strategy: buy single-sided, and if the need appears, upgrade. On others the capability is fixed at manufacture, and wanting the second side later means buying a second printer.

Before you buy a single-sided machine, ask us specifically whether that model can be upgraded and what the upgrade costs. It is a one-line question and it prevents an expensive surprise.

Our general advice, particularly for organizations that have not run a card program before: if there is any real chance you will want the back of the card, buy dual-sided at the start. The premium at purchase is almost always smaller than the cost of changing your mind.

The manual workaround, and why it disappoints

Any single-sided printer can print both sides if somebody flips the card and runs it through again.

For a handful of cards that is fine. For any volume it falls apart. It doubles the handling time, it introduces alignment differences between the two sides, and it invites the obvious human errors of feeding a card the wrong way round or printing the wrong back onto the wrong front.

It also does not work at all with encoding. If the printer is encoding a stripe or a chip as part of the job, running the card through a second time means either re-encoding it or building a separate workflow to avoid that.

Treat it as a way to handle an exception, not as a substitute for a dual-sided machine.

When single-sided is genuinely the right answer

Plenty of card programs never need a second side, and buying dual-sided for them is money spent on nothing.

Short-lived cards are the clearest case. An event badge worn for three days does not need terms of use on the back. Visitor passes collected the same day are similar.

Simple membership and loyalty cards often work perfectly with a single side, particularly where the organization's details are already on a pre-printed card stock.

And some programs are constrained by budget in a way that makes the trade obvious. A small non-profit issuing volunteer badges is better served by a good single-sided printer than a stretched dual-sided one.

A middle path worth knowing

Pre-printed card stock gives you a second side without a dual-sided printer.

You have cards produced in bulk with your standard back already printed: terms, return address, contact number, whatever is the same on every card. Then you print the variable front side in house on a single-sided machine.

The economics work well when the back never changes and volumes are high enough to justify a print run. The limitation is exactly that: the back cannot carry anything specific to the cardholder, so no barcodes, no member numbers, no dates. If your second side is purely static, this is often the cheapest good answer.

Working out which you need

Write down everything the card has to communicate. Photo, name, role, organization, member or employee number, barcode, access technology, expiry, terms, contact details.

Now try to lay it out on one side at a size somebody can actually read. If it fits comfortably, buy single-sided. If it does not, or if you are shrinking type to make it fit, buy dual-sided.

Then check one more thing: whether anything on your list needs to be machine readable. Barcodes in particular want space and contrast, and squeezing one onto a crowded front is how you end up with a code that scans on the third attempt.

Full specifications for each machine, including which are single or dual-sided and which can be upgraded, are on the product pages in our ID card printer range. The printer finder filters by that among other things, and if you would rather just describe your card to a person, that works too.

A note on encoding and the second side

If your cards carry a magnetic stripe, the stripe is on the back, and that constrains what else can go there. Printing over a magnetic stripe is not possible on most stock, so your back-of-card design has to work around it.

The practical result is that mag stripe cards have less usable space on the back than people expect. Lay the design out against the actual stripe position before committing, and if the content will not fit around it, consider whether a barcode on the front is the better answer.