Kangaro DP-800 plus Heavy Duty Punches

A hole punch, also known as hole puncher, or paper puncher, is an office tool that is used to create holes in sheets of paper, often for the purpose of collecting the sheets in a binder or folder. The term can also refer to tools of different construction from one designed for paper, such as a those used for leather goods (generally called a leather punch), for cloth, for thin plastic sheeting, and for variations of sheet metal, such as aluminum siding or metal air ducts.

A typical hole punch, whether a single or multiple hole punch, has a long lever which is used to push a bladed cylinder, the punch, straight through one or more sheets of paper and then through a close-fitting hole in the die. As the vertical travel distance of the cylinder is only a few millimeters, it can be positioned within a centimeter of the lever fulcrum. For low volume hole punches, the resulting lever need not be more than 8 centimetres (3.1 in) for sufficient force.

Two paper guides are needed to line up the paper: one opposite where the paper is inserted, to set the margin distance, and one on an adjacent side.

Hole punches for industrial volumes (hundreds of sheets) feature very long lever arms, but function identically.

Another mechanism uses hollowed drills which are lowered by a screwing action into the paper. The paper is cut and forced up into the shaft of the drill to be later discarded as tightly packed columns of waste paper. This method allows a small machine to cut industrial volumes of paper with little effort.