Debt Payoff Calculator

A debt calculator usually asks for one balance. Most households carry four or five at once — a card, a store account, a personal loan, a car — and the question they actually have is not what any one payment costs. It is how long the whole set takes on the money that can be found for it each month, and what the set will have cost by the time it is gone.

The arithmetic runs a month at a time. Every balance is charged its own interest, every minimum is paid, and whatever the budget has left over goes to one target debt. When that debt reaches zero its minimum is not retired with it — the money joins the surplus and reaches the next balance in the same month, which is why the later debts fall so much faster than the first. That rollover is the whole of what a debt reduction calculator adds over clearing each balance on its own schedule.

The debt-free date here is the month the final balance reaches zero, counted forward from the first payment. Where the budget will not cover the minimums the page reports the shortfall and stops, rather than printing a date that assumes money which is not there. Nothing typed is transmitted, nothing is kept between visits, and the calculation itself never leaves the browser.

The debt-free date is the month the last balance reaches zero, counted forward from the first payment date rather than averaged across the debts. Thirty-four monthly payments beginning 1 October 2026 end on 1 July 2029, because the last of them falls thirty-three months after the first. What a debt free calculator hands back is that one date for the whole set, and a date is the coarser of the two measures on the panel: it moves only when a whole month is saved, while the interest figure moves every month. Each balance also carries its own closing month, and the debt-free date is simply the last of them.

A freed minimum moves in the month it is freed, not the month after. In the example below the store card owes $111.49 in month six; its own $45.00 minimum covers part of that and $66.49 of the $330.00 surplus finishes it. The $263.51 left over reaches the credit card in that same month and takes it to $5,705.63. From month seven the credit card receives $530.00 — its own $155.00 minimum, the $330.00 surplus and the store card's freed $45.00 — and that figure keeps growing as each debt closes.

On these four debts the two orderings return the same plan, to the cent. The store card is the smallest balance and also the highest rate, and below it the balances rise in exactly the order the rates fall, so smallest-first and highest-rate-first pick the same sequence: 34 months, $5,130.95 of interest, the same four closing months. The methods are not always close and they are not always different; here the gap is nothing at all, which is worth knowing before choosing between them. Raise the personal loan's rate to 24.900% and the orders do part company — the highest-rate plan pays it second instead of third and saves $179.64, while both still finish in 37 months.

The budget decides far more than the ordering does. Drop to $770.00 a month, which is exactly the four minimums added together, and the same debts take 57 months and $11,737.42 of interest, ending on 1 June 2031. The $330.00 of surplus is therefore worth 23 months and $6,606.47, against the nothing that the choice of method is worth on these numbers. Where the two do differ, the planner page prints the gap in months and in interest rather than arguing for one of them.

The last month costs less than the budget. Thirty-three months of $1,100.00 are followed by a final month of $580.95, because that month only has to clear what is left. The two come to $36,880.95, which is the $31,750.00 owed at the start plus $5,130.95 of interest — the identity every plan on this site is checked against before any figure is shown.

B

your total monthly budget across every debt

iₖ

each debt's interest for month k, rounded half-up to the cent

bₖ₋₁

that debt's balance before this month's interest

Each month: interest is added to every open balance, every open debt receives its minimum, and whatever is left of the budget goes to one target debt — the first in the chosen order that is still open.

When a debt closes, it simply stops receiving anything, so its former minimum stays in the budget and reaches the next target in the same month. That is the rollover, and it is a consequence of the rule rather than an extra step.

The rounding rule, the final-payment adjustment and the published test vectors are all on the methodology page.

One loan or several, fixed payment or revolving — that is the real question behind this family of calculators, and it decides which page answers yours.