Credit Card Payoff Calculator

What Is a Credit Card Payoff?

Revolving credit is built the opposite way round from a loan. A lender writing a 60-month note fixes the term first and derives the payment from it, which is why the finish date is printed on the contract. An issuer fixes nothing but a monthly minimum, so the finish date does not exist until you supply the missing number yourself — and it moves every time that number changes.

Why a Card Has No Payoff Date Until You Set One

Three quantities decide the whole outcome, and only two of them are printed on your statement.

• The balance carried past the due date. This is the figure interest is charged on, not the statement total you may have partly paid.
• The APR on that balance. Cards commonly run several APRs at once — purchases, cash advances, and any promotional transfer each get their own — and this calculator models one at a time.
• The payment you commit to. Nothing on the statement fixes this above the minimum, and it is the only one of the three you control outright.

That third quantity is doing almost all of the work. On $5,000 at 22% APR, $125 a month returns 73 months (6y 1m); $500 a month returns 12 months (1y 0m). Same debt, same rate, same card — the only thing that changed is the number you typed, and it moved the finish line by five years.

Debt with a term written into it behaves differently in every respect, and the balance falls on a schedule you can see in advance with the Loan Repayment Calculator.

Interest Is Taken Before Principal

Each month the issuer adds interest to the balance, and your payment settles that interest before any of it reduces what you owe. The monthly interest is the balance times the APR divided by 1,200 — $5,000 at 22% gives $91.67 in month one. Whatever the payment is above $91.67 is the only part that shrinks the debt, which is why the same dollar is worth so much more inside a large payment than a small one.

The interest column never moves, because in month one the balance is the same in every row. Doubling the payment from $125 to $250 does not double the progress — it multiplies the principal portion by more than four, from $33.33 to $158.33. That leverage is the reason the payoff curve is so steep just above the minimum and so flat once the payment is comfortably clear of the interest.

The Payment That Never Clears the Balance

Below one specific figure, the arithmetic has no answer at all: if the payment does not cover the month's interest, the balance ends the month larger than it started and does so forever. The calculator tests for this before projecting anything.

Monthly interest = balance × APR ÷ 1200

If payment ≤ monthly interest, the balance never falls.

That floor is worth knowing for your own numbers, because it sits higher than most people assume on a five-figure balance:

Enter a payment at or below the figure in your row and the panel turns amber instead of projecting. On $15,000 at 22% with $250 a month it reads: "$250.00 doesn't cover the $275.00 of monthly interest at 22% — the balance would grow forever. Raise the payment above the interest". The comparison is inclusive, so a payment exactly equal to the interest is refused too — it holds the balance level rather than clearing it.

How Do You Calculate Credit Card Payoff?

Both directions come out of the same annuity relationship used for any amortizing debt, rearranged to solve for whichever quantity you are missing. The only card-specific part is the monthly rate: the APR divided by 1,200, which converts a percentage into a decimal and a year into a month in one step.

The Credit Card Payoff Formula

With B for the balance, r for the monthly rate, P for the payment and m for the number of months:

r = APR ÷ 1200

Months from a payment:
  m = −log(1 − r × B ÷ P) ÷ log(1 + r)

Payment from a deadline:
  P = B × r ÷ (1 − (1 + r)^−m)

Guard:  if P ≤ B × r, there is no solution.

• r is a decimal per month, not a percentage per year: 22% becomes 0.0183333.
• The logarithm can be natural or base ten — it appears in both the numerator and the denominator, so the base cancels.
• The guard is not a design choice. When P ≤ B × r the bracket (1 − r × B ÷ P) is zero or negative, and the logarithm of a non-positive number does not exist.
• The month count is rounded up to a whole month, because a card is billed in whole cycles. The deadline direction rounds the other way: P goes up to the next cent, so the schedule finishes inside the deadline rather than a few cents short of it.
• Neither closed form gives the interest. The calculator gets that by walking the schedule — adding B × r to the balance each month, subtracting the payment, and letting the last month take only what is left — then adding the accruals up.

The 0% case is handled separately in both directions, since r = 0 collapses the formula. With no interest the months are simply the balance divided by the payment, rounded up, and the payment is the balance divided by the months — which is why a promotional-rate transfer can be modeled here by entering 0 in the APR field.

Step by Step

By hand, with any calculator that has a log key, the payment-to-months direction takes about a minute.

• Divide the APR by 1,200. On a 22% card that is 0.0183333.
• Multiply that by the balance. This is month one's interest, and the floor your payment has to beat: 0.0183333 × 5,000 = $91.67.
• Divide the same product by your payment: 91.667 ÷ 200 = 0.458333.
• Subtract from one: 1 − 0.458333 = 0.541667.
• Take the log of that, and the log of 1.0183333. Divide the first by the second and flip the sign: −(−0.613104) ÷ 0.018167 = 33.748.
• Round up to the next whole month. 33.748 becomes 34.

Step five is where hand calculations go wrong, because both logarithms are small numbers close to each other and rounding either one early moves the answer by whole months. Keep six decimals until the division is done.

Worked Example: $5,000 at 22% Paying $200 a Month

Solve For set to "I pay $X/month — how long?", Card Balance 5000, Card APR 22, Payment or Months 200.

r = 22 ÷ 1200 = 0.0183333
B × r = 5,000 × 0.0183333 = 91.667   (below 200, so a solution exists)
m = −log(1 − 91.667 ÷ 200) ÷ log(1.0183333) = 33.748 → 34

Panel headline

34 months (2y 10m)

Under the headline the panel prints four rows. The first restates the inputs as "$5,000.00 at 22% APR, paying $200.00/month". The second is labeled Total interest and reads "$1,749.88 (35.0% of the balance)". The third, Total handed over, reads "$6,749.88". The fourth, Final payment, reads "$149.88 — smaller than the rest, which is why the total is not $200.00 times 34".

Those totals come from the schedule, not from multiplying $200 by 34. Thirty-three payments of $200 do the bulk of the work and the thirty-fourth asks only for the $149.88 still outstanding, which is why $6,749.88 changes hands rather than the $6,800 that 34 full payments would come to. Month one splits $91.67 to interest and $108.33 to the balance; by the final month almost the whole payment is principal.

Worked Example: Clearing $5,000 in Twelve Months

Same balance and rate, with Solve For switched to "Payoff in X months — what payment?" and Payment or Months set to 12.

P = 5,000 × 0.0183333 ÷ (1 − 1.0183333^−12)
P = 91.667 ÷ 0.195881 = 467.9719 → rounded up to the cent, 467.98

Payment returned

$467.98/month

The rows beneath read "Clears $5,000.00 at 22% APR in 12 months", then Total interest "$615.65 (12.3% of the balance)", Total handed over "$5,615.65", and Final payment "$467.87 — the last month clears whatever is left".

Twelve payments of $467.98 come to $5,615.76, eleven cents more than the schedule needs, so the twelfth statement asks for $467.87 instead. That is the whole of the difference: rounding the payment up to a payable figure hands eleven cents over early, and the last month gives them back.

Why the Deadline Payment Is Rounded Up

Run the deadline mode, then type its answer back into the payment mode, and the two agree: twelve months in becomes $467.98 out, and $467.98 in comes back as 12 months (1y 0m) carrying the same $615.65 of interest. That agreement is deliberate, and it is the reason the payment is rounded the way it is.

The exact requirement is $467.9719 a month, and rounding that down to $467.97 is not quite enough. Twelve payments of the smaller figure leave three cents outstanding, so the payment mode reports 13 months (1y 1m) with a final payment of $0.03 — a partial cycle is still a cycle. Rounding up to the next cent removes that whole class of off-by-one. Read the month count as the number of statements you will receive, not as a measure of how much debt is left in the last one; the Final payment row is what tells you that.

Credit Card Payoff Chart

Every figure below is this calculator's own output. The first chart holds the balance and rate still at $5,000 and 22% APR and varies only the payment.

Read the top two rows first. At $100 a month the interest alone comes to $8,678.06 on a $5,000 debt — the card costs more than it lent. Adding $25 to that payment removes 64 months and $4,583.52 of interest — the biggest single step in any table on this page, and the reason the zone just above the floor is where attention belongs.

The fourth column is the one people do not expect. A final payment is whatever the schedule leaves, so it bears no relation to the others: $21.60 at $300 a month, $149.88 at $200, $294.02 at $1,000. That last one matches the whole interest bill exactly, because five payments of $1,000 come to precisely the $5,000 borrowed and the sixth is left holding nothing but the cost of getting there.

The $400 and $500 rows make the same point from the other side. Fifteen payments of $400 and twelve of $500 both multiply out to $6,000, yet the slower plan costs $731.60 in interest against $574.44 — $157.16 more for the same notional outlay, because the balance sat there three months longer.

One Chart for Any Balance

Payoff time does not depend on the size of the debt. It depends on the payment expressed as a percentage of the balance, and on the APR. Paying $200 on $5,000 and $800 on $20,000 are the same 4%, and both return 34 months (2y 10m) with the same 35.0% of the balance lost to interest. That makes a single chart usable at any balance: divide your payment by your balance, find the nearest row, then read across to your rate.

The "never" cells are the floor from earlier, in percentage form: the monthly rate is the APR divided by twelve, so 26% blocks anything at or below 2.167% of the balance and 30% blocks anything at or below 2.5%. Notice how the rate stops mattering as the payment rises. At 2% of the balance the gap between a 15% card and a 22% card is 58 months; at 8% it is one month. A high APR is only punishing when the payment is small enough to leave the balance sitting there.

The Same Debt Across APRs

Holding the balance at $5,000 and the payment at $200, and moving only the rate:

Tripling the rate from 12% to 36% adds 18 months and multiplies the accrued interest from $782.44 to $4,380.17, roughly five and a half times. The timeline barely reacts by comparison — 29 months to 47 — which is the trap in judging a card by how long the payoff "feels". A rate increase is paid in dollars long before it shows up as years.

The 21% and 22% rows are worth a glance too: both come back as 34 months (2y 10m), yet the interest differs by $116.68 — $1,633.20 against $1,749.88. Two cards can return an identical headline and still not cost the same.

What Each Deadline Costs

The other mode, priced out. Each row is the payment the calculator returns for that deadline on $5,000 at 22% APR, with the interest that accrues along the way.

At 22% each extra month on the deadline costs almost exactly one further percentage point of the balance — 0.97 points a month between the six- and twelve-month rows, rising to 1.21 by the time you reach five years. There is a reason it lands so close to one: the monthly rate is 1.833%, and across a straight-line payoff the average balance outstanding is about half the original, so each additional month adds roughly 0.9% of the starting balance in interest.

The last row is also the answer to a question the payment mode cannot ask. Stretching a $5,000 card to five years costs $3,285.41, two-thirds of the balance again, for a payment $52.86 below the three-year figure.

How to Read Your Result

The three number fields ship empty, so the panel sits on its prompt until you press Calculate. It does not recompute as you type — every change needs the button again, and Reset returns the panel to that starting state.

The Five Lines the Panel Returns

Both modes return a headline plus four rows beneath it, always five in total.

• The headline. In payment mode it is a month count, with years and months in brackets once it reaches twelve — "34 months (2y 10m)", while eleven months shows as "11 months" alone. In deadline mode it is the payment: "$467.98/month".
• A restatement of the inputs, so a screenshot carries its own assumptions: "$5,000.00 at 22% APR, paying $200.00/month".
• A row labeled Total interest, pairing the dollar figure with the same figure as a percentage of the balance — "$1,749.88 (35.0% of the balance)".
• A row labeled Total handed over: the balance plus that interest, "$6,749.88".
• A row labeled Final payment, giving the size of the last one and saying why the total is not the monthly payment times the term — "$149.88 — smaller than the rest, which is why the total is not $200.00 times 34".

The percentage in the third row is the most portable number on the panel, because it is invariant to the size of the debt. Any balance paid at 4% of itself per month at 22% APR loses 35.0% to interest — $1,749.88 on $5,000, $3,499.76 on $10,000, $6,999.52 on $20,000. It travels between cards in a way that a dollar figure does not.

Why the Last Payment Is Not Like the Others

A card is billed in whole cycles, so the month count is rounded up — but the final statement only ever asks for what is genuinely left. The Final payment row is that figure, and whatever it falls short of a full payment by is exactly why the total handed over is less than the payment multiplied by the term. On $5,000 at 22%:

• At $150 a month the last payment is $148.05, barely short of a full one, and $7,798.05 changes hands against the $7,800 that 52 full payments would come to.
• At $200 the last payment is $149.88 and the gap is $50.12.
• At $250 the last payment is $35.72 and the gap is $214.28, on a plan only eight months shorter.
• At $500 the last payment is $74.44 and the gap is $425.56 — most of a full payment, on a twelve-month plan.

There is no pattern to find in that column. The size of the last payment is whatever the schedule leaves after the second-to-last one, so it can be within two dollars of a full payment at $150 a month and a seventh of one at $250. Budget for the full monthly figure in every month of the plan, and treat whatever the last statement does not ask for as money you keep.

When the Panel Turns Amber

An amber notice replaces the result rather than sitting alongside it, and the wording names the cause. There are two distinct stages, and they behave differently.

• A blank field is caught before the formula runs. None of the three number fields is optional here, so leaving one empty produces a message naming it — "Enter a value for Card APR." — and several empty fields are listed together, as in "Enter a value for: Card Balance, Card APR."
• A value the formula rejects produces its own text. Zero or a negative balance returns "Enter the card balance". An APR below 0 or above 60 returns "Enter the card's APR (0–60%)". A payment of zero or less returns "Enter your monthly payment". A deadline of zero or less, or above 600, returns "Enter the months to pay it off (1–600)".
• A fractional deadline is refused as well. Enter 12.5 in deadline mode and the panel reads "Enter a whole number of months (1–600)", because a card is billed in whole cycles and half a statement is not a thing you can pay.
• A payment at or below the month's interest returns the floor message, naming both figures.
• 0% is a legal APR and produces a normal result, not an error, which is what makes the promotional-rate modeling below possible.

One trap has no guard behind it, because both readings are numerically valid. Payment or Months is a single field serving two modes, and a number that belongs in one is often accepted by the other. Type 200 while the deadline mode is selected and you get $94.16/month for a 200-month plan, not the 34 months you were expecting. Check the mode before the number.

What the Minimum Payment Box on Your Statement Means

US card statements carry a repayment disclosure that exists for exactly the reason this page does. Regulation Z, at § 1026.7(b)(12)(i)(A), requires the words "Minimum Payment Warning: If you make only the minimum payment each period, you will pay more in interest and it will take you longer to pay off your balance", followed by an estimate of how long the balance would take to clear at that pace.

The Three-Year Figure, Reproduced

The same disclosure carries a second number. As the CFPB puts it, issuers "are also required to tell you on each statement, based on the balance as of the date of the statement, how much you need to pay each month to pay off your current balance in 36 months." That is the deadline mode with 36 entered, and you can check your statement against it.

On $5,000 at 22% APR the calculator returns $190.96/month, clearing the balance in 36 months for $1,874.17 of interest — 37.5% of the balance, and $6,874.17 handed over. The CFPB is explicit about what the box does not include: "These amounts are calculated based on your current balance and do not take into consideration any future purchases." Neither does this calculator. Anything you charge to the card after today is outside both figures.

Consolidating the balance onto a fixed term at a lower rate is the other way to force a deadline, and its total cost is priced by the Personal Loan Calculator.

Why the Minimum Stretches and a Fixed Payment Does Not

A minimum payment is recalculated from the balance every cycle, so as the debt falls the required payment falls with it and the last stretch crawls. The exact terms are in your cardholder agreement, but the common shape is the month's interest plus about 1% of the balance, with a floor of around $25.

Modeling $5,000 at 22% on that convention month by month, the first minimum is $141.67 and the balance takes 230 months — 19 years and 2 months — with $8,099.77 of interest, for $13,099.77 handed over against $5,000 borrowed. That declining-payment path is not something this calculator computes; it takes a fixed payment.

What it does compute is the fix. Freeze the payment at that same first minimum of $141.67 and never let it drop, and the panel returns 58 months (4y 10m) with a Total interest row of "$3,121.28 (62.4% of the balance)", $8,121.28 handed over, and a final payment of $46.09. Nothing was added to the budget. The 14 years and 4 months came entirely from refusing to let the payment shrink.

Balance Transfers, Avalanche, and Snowball

Three decisions sit on top of the arithmetic, and each of them can be priced with the tool rather than argued about. Enter 0 in the APR field to model a promotional rate, and run each card separately when there is more than one.

Does a Balance Transfer Beat Staying Put?

A balance transfer fee is, in the CFPB's words, "a fee charged to transfer an outstanding balance to a different credit card", and it applies to promotional offers as well — "a credit card company is permitted to charge you a balance transfer fee on a zero percent rate offer." Fees are commonly quoted at 3% to 5% of the amount moved, often with a dollar minimum, so read the offer rather than assuming. Introductory rates have a floor on their length: the CFPB notes the rate "has to stay in effect for at least six months, unless you are more than 60 days late on a payment."

Compare like for like by fixing the horizon. Take $5,000 at 22%, an 18-month promotional window, and a 3% fee that adds $150 to the transferred balance.

The 3% transfer is $765.56 ahead — $915.56 of interest avoided against $150 paid — and it does it while asking $42.53 less each month. At 5% it is $665.56 ahead. The break-even is easy to state: over these 18 months the interest costs 18.3% of the balance, so any fee below 18.3% wins provided the balance actually clears inside the window.

What Happens If the Window Closes First

The usual warning is that a transfer you fail to clear in time undoes itself. Priced out, it is milder than the warning suggests. Pay $200 a month against the transferred $5,150 and 18 payments come to $3,600, leaving $1,550 when the promotional rate ends. At a 24.99% go-to rate the calculator gives 9 months for that remainder, with $158.46 of interest.

Total cost of the transfer route: $150 of fee plus $158.46 of interest, cleared in 27 months. Staying on the original card at the same $200 a month costs $1,749.88 over 34 months. Missing the deadline cost something, but far less than not transferring did.

What actually undoes a transfer is new spending, not the calendar. The CFPB is direct about it: "For most credit cards, if you carry a balance month to month, any purchases you make will accrue interest from the date of the transaction", and "this is true even if another balance you are carrying is not subject to interest because it was a 0% balance transfer." A card in payoff mode has to stop being a card you spend on.

Avalanche and Snowball on Three Cards

With several balances, the order you attack them in changes the total. Avalanche sends every spare dollar to the highest APR; snowball sends it to the smallest balance. Take three cards — $1,200 at 26.99%, $3,500 at 22%, and $800 at 15.99%, $5,500 in total — and a fixed $400 a month across all of them, with minimums modeled as the month's interest plus 1% of the balance, floored at $25.

Avalanche wins by $68.61 and one month, on $5,500 of debt over roughly a year and a half. That is real and it is also small — about 1.2% of the balance — which is worth knowing before treating the choice as the important decision. Snowball buys its first cleared card a month earlier, and a plan you keep running beats an optimal plan you abandon. What separates both from doing nothing is not a percentage: modeled the same way, paying only the minimums on all three takes 195 months and $7,123.09 of interest — eight times the avalanche figure, over twelve times as long, on a first-month outlay of $163.16 rather than $400.

The ordering is partly out of your hands in any case. Regulation Z requires that where balances carry different rates, "the card issuer must allocate the excess amount first to the balance with the highest annual percentage rate and any remaining portion to the other balances in descending order based on the applicable annual percentage rate" — so within one card, anything above the minimum is already following avalanche logic.

What an Extra $50 a Month Is Worth

Increases are not worth the same at every level, and the calculator prices each step. On $5,000 at 22%, moving up in $50 increments:

The first $50 buys $1,048.17. The fourth buys $170.40. Every increment is worth having, but the ones nearest the floor are worth six times the ones further up, so a temporary boost is best spent early rather than saved for later. A one-off lump sum behaves the same way: dropping the balance from $5,000 to $4,000 before starting, and then paying $200 a month, takes the timeline from 34 months to 26 months (2y 2m) and the accrued interest from $1,749.88 to $1,028.58 — $721.30 saved by a $1,000 payment.

Money aimed at a card is money not earning anywhere else, and the return you are giving up is worth checking against the rate you are avoiding with the Compound Interest Calculator.

Limits: When This Calculator Does Not Apply

The model is a fixed payment against a single balance at a single rate, with interest applied once a month. Real card accounts depart from that in several ways, and each departure moves the true figure away from the one on screen.

Issuers Compound Daily, Not Monthly

This is the largest structural simplification. The CFPB describes the mechanism: "a daily periodic interest rate generally is used to calculate interest by multiplying the rate by the amount owed at the end of each day", the result "is then added to the previous day's balance, which means that interest is compounding on a daily basis", and the daily rate "generally can be calculated by dividing the annual percentage rate, or APR, by either 360 or 365, depending on the card issuer."

Dividing by twelve instead gives an effective annual rate of 24.3597% on a 22% APR, against 24.5994% for daily compounding on a 365-day divisor. On the $5,000 at $200 a month example, a daily model using 30-day months accrues $1,736.75 over the same 34 months, $13.13 below the $1,749.88 here. The direction of the error is not fixed, though: assume a 31-day cycle instead, the longest a real statement period runs, and the daily model reaches 35 months and $1,825.61 — $75.73 the other way, 4.3% above the monthly figure. A 30.44-day cycle, which is what a calendar year divided by twelve comes to, lands between the two at $1,775.34 and still clears in 34 months. Treat the output as accurate to about one billing cycle, not to the cent.

The same daily accrual means timing matters in a way no monthly model can show. Because interest is charged on the average daily balance, the CFPB notes that "if you don't have a grace period, the sooner you pay off all or some of your balance, the less interest you will pay" — so splitting one monthly payment into two earlier ones reduces the average balance slightly. The tool cannot size that effect; it accepts one payment per month.

New Purchases and the Lost Grace Period

The projection assumes the balance only ever goes down. Once you are carrying a balance, one specific mechanism makes that assumption fragile: a grace period, in the CFPB's definition, is "the period between the end of a billing cycle and the date your payment is due", and "if you lose your grace period by not paying your balance in full by the due date, you will be charged interest on the unpaid portion of the balance."

The knock-on is that new purchases stop being interest-free. With a balance carried month to month, purchases accrue interest from the transaction date rather than from the next statement — so every charge added during a payoff plan enters the calculation at full rate immediately, and the timeline you calculated stops describing your card. Rerun the numbers with the new balance rather than assuming the old projection still holds.

What the Fields Accept

The form is submitted without browser validation, and a blank field is stopped by the page's own script rather than by the formula. Everything else is checked inside the formula, and the limits are worth knowing before you trust an unusual entry.

• Card Balance must be above zero. There is no upper limit.
• Card APR must be from 0 to 60 inclusive. 0 is accepted and modeled properly; 60.1 is refused. A card or a fee-heavy product priced above 60% cannot be modeled here.
• In payment mode, Payment or Months must be above zero, and above the month's interest for a projection to exist.
• In deadline mode it must be a whole number from 1 to 600. Both halves of that are enforced: 601 and 12.5 are each refused, with their own message.
• At the 600-month cap the required payment on $5,000 at 22% comes back as $91.67, the same figure as month one's interest once both are rounded to the cent. The two guards meet there: the longest plan the tool will draw is the one that barely outruns the interest.

Nothing about the arithmetic is currency-specific. Enter pounds or euros and the labels will say dollars while the numbers stay correct, since the formula only ever divides one money figure by another.

Costs and Events the Model Ignores

Each of these changes the answer, and none of them has an input field.

• Annual fees. A $95 annual fee on a three-year payoff is $285 that never appears in the interest figure.
• Late and over-limit fees, which are added to the balance and then accrue interest like any other charge.
• Penalty APRs. A rate that rises after a missed payment breaks the single-rate assumption from that month onward.
• Variable rates. Most card APRs move with an index, so a multi-year projection is a snapshot at today's rate rather than a forecast.
• Multiple balances on one card. Purchases, cash advances, and transferred balances usually carry different APRs and are modeled one at a time here.
• Deferred-interest promotions, where the interest is waived only if the balance clears in full by the deadline and otherwise charged retroactively from the purchase date.

For anything on that list, the practical approach is to fold the known dollar amounts into the balance before calculating — an annual fee and any outstanding fees are simply debt — and to rerun the projection whenever the rate changes rather than trusting a figure computed under the old one.

If the numbers here run past a decade, the balance has stopped being a budgeting problem, and a secured route at a mortgage-like rate is the comparison worth making with the Home Equity Calculator.