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Does ABS take longer to print than PLA?

Yes — around fifty percent longer for the same geometry, and none of it is the material's own doing.

The 60 mm cube that takes 3.95 hours at 60 mm/s takes 5.88 hours at 40 mm/s, which is a realistic ABS speed once part cooling has been turned down to stop the layers contracting away from each other.

Slower is a warping mitigation, not a melt limit

ABS extrudes perfectly happily at PLA flow rates. The problem is what happens after it leaves the nozzle: it contracts 0.4 to 0.8% as it cools, against PLA's 0.2 to 0.5%, and it does that while the bottom of the part is welded to a hot plate.

Print it fast with the fan on and the top of a tall part cools and shrinks while the bottom cannot, which lifts corners off the bed and splits layers apart. So ABS is printed slowly, with minimal cooling, in a hot enclosed chamber — three settings that all cost time and all exist to keep the part flat.

The time before the print starts

A 90 to 110 °C bed takes considerably longer to reach temperature than PLA's 60 °C, and an enclosure needs to soak afterwards so the chamber air is warm rather than just the plate.

That preheat is minutes, not hours, and it contributes almost nothing to the energy bill. But it is real wall-clock time and it is absent from every slicer estimate.

The time after the print finishes

This is the one that catches people. An ABS part should cool inside the closed enclosure rather than being pulled off a hot plate into room air, because a sudden thermal gradient is what cracks a large part along a layer line after a successful print.

On a big part that is another wait, and it is not optional if you want the part intact.

The honest total

Machine time up by roughly half. Wall-clock time up by more, once preheat, soak and controlled cooling are counted. And a higher failure rate on top of that — the ABS spool costing table on this site assumes 15% against PLA's 5%, which is another kind of time entirely.

Drop the speed field in the print time estimator to whatever your enclosure lets you get away with, and read the rest of the material's behaviour on the ABS page.