Personal Loan Calculator

A personal loan is unsecured, so there is no collateral, no escrow and no mortgage insurance — just an amount borrowed, a fixed rate, a fixed number of months, and a payment that never changes. That makes the arithmetic clean. The level payment comes from the present-value relationship in Regulation Z, 12 CFR Part 1026 Appendix J: M = P x i(1+i)^n / ((1+i)^n - 1), where P is the amount you borrow, n is the number of scheduled monthly payments, and i is the annual rate divided by 1,200. Enter the term as years plus any odd months — 5 years and 6 months is 66 payments — because that is how lenders quote personal loans, and the two boxes are summed once before the formula sees them. What happens after that is not a formula but a walk. This calculator steps through every month the way a servicer bills it: interest on the balance you still owe, rounded to the cent, subtracted first; whatever is left of the payment retires principal. That is why the total interest here will differ by cents to a couple of dollars from payment x term minus principal, and why the last payment is trimmed so the balance lands on exactly zero rather than sixteen cents above or below it. The extra-payment box feeds the same walk. An extra amount reduces the balance in the month you pay it, so the next month's interest is charged on a smaller number and the saving compounds backwards through the rest of the schedule — $200 a month on a $25,000 loan at 6.99% saves considerably more than $200 times the months you finish early. The loop simply ends when the balance clears, so the row count is your real payoff date. The rails are wide on purpose: rates from 0% to 40%, terms up to 40 years and 11 months, extra payments up to $1,000,000. A 0% entry is handled by its own branch, since the annuity formula divides by the periodic rate; the payment is just the principal split evenly and the interest is zero. Here is the part almost nobody expects. At high enough rates on a long enough term, the rounded payment does not exceed the first month of rounded interest, and the balance never falls at all — $25,000 at 30% over 40 years bills $625.00 a month against $625.00 of interest, so the headline payment describes a loan that ends in a balloon for the entire debt. Stranger still, the boundary is not a clean threshold: at $25,000 over 360 months, 38.25% stalls but 38.26% amortizes normally, because whether the payment clears the interest depends on where each one lands relative to a cent. Results in that region are labelled rather than quietly reported. One thing this page deliberately does not do is fold in your origination fee. It asks for the note rate, not the APR, because the note rate is what drives the payment. Where a personal loan carries an origination fee deducted from the cash you receive, you repay the full face amount while pocketing less — the effect on your true cost belongs in the APR calculator, where fees reduce the amount financed. If you want to see the month-by-month table for the same loan in more detail, the amortization calculator uses this same engine. Before you pay extra, read your note: tell the servicer in writing to apply the money to principal, or some will hold it as a prepayment of next month and you will save nothing at all.