Your monthly payment, what you end up paying and where each payment goes. Free, nothing to install, no sign-up.
This calculator gives you the monthly payment on a loan, what you end up paying in total, and where each payment goes: how much is interest and how much actually reduces the debt. Enter the amount you are borrowing, the annual rate and the term. It runs inside your browser, so your figures are never sent anywhere, and the table downloads as a PDF.
Almost all loans use level repayments: the same amount every month. The formula is payment = principal × i ÷ (1 − (1 + i) to the power of −n), where n is the number of months and i is the MONTHLY rate, that is the annual rate divided by twelve. That detail matters: put the annual rate where the monthly one belongs and the payment comes out nonsense.
Ten thousand at 6% a year over five years. The monthly rate is 6 ÷ 12 = 0.5%, that is 0.005, and there are 60 months. The payment works out at 193.33. Multiplied by 60 months that is 11,599.80, so the interest over the whole loan is 1,599.80. That second number is the one worth looking at and it is almost never in the advert: the monthly payment is always shown, the total paid hardly ever.
The payment is fixed, but how it splits is not. Each month the interest is worked out on what you STILL owe, and whatever is left of the payment is what comes off the balance. At the start you owe a lot, so interest eats most of the payment and the debt falls slowly; at the end you owe little, the interest is tiny and almost all of the payment comes off the balance. That is why halfway through a long loan you still owe well over half — it is no trick, just the same sum repeated.
The quick check: the payment times the number of months has to give you the total paid, and that total minus what you borrowed is the interest. And a sanity check: the payment always has to be more than principal ÷ months, because on top of the money you are paying interest. If it comes out equal or less, you have set the rate to zero or entered it wrong.
Annual — that is how loans are advertised and what the box asks for. The calculator divides it by twelve internally to do the monthly sum. If you entered the monthly rate, the payment would come out roughly twelve times too high.
Because interest is charged every month on what you still owe, and over a long term that adds up. Stretching the term lowers the payment but RAISES the total, because the money is on loan for longer. That is the trade-off to see before signing, which is why the calculator shows both figures and not just the payment.
No. It works out the payment from the three things you give it: principal, rate and term. Arrangement fees, tied insurance and other charges are not in there, and those are exactly what make a contract’s APR higher than its headline rate. To compare offers properly, look at the APR in the contract.
No. Everything is worked out inside your browser: the amounts you type never leave your device and are not stored anywhere. No account, no email address.
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