Personal Loan Calculator

What Is a Personal Loan?

Take away the marketing and a personal loan is the plainest credit product on the shelf. A lender hands over a lump sum, you hand back equal monthly amounts for an agreed number of years, and nothing you own is on the line if it goes wrong. That last part is what sets the price. A mortgage or a car loan leaves the lender an asset to take back; here there is nothing to take, so the whole cost of the loan is carried by the rate and the fee, and by whatever your credit file says about the risk.

The Four Numbers This Calculator Needs

Everything on this page comes from four entries, and three of them are on the offer document in front of you.

• Loan amount — the figure the lender has approved, before anything is deducted. Interest is charged on this number, not on what reaches your account.
• Interest rate — the annual rate you have been quoted, typed as a percentage. Enter 11, not 0.11. Values below zero or above 100 are rejected.
• Term — two, three, five, or seven years, chosen from four buttons rather than typed. The control opens on two years, so set it before reading anything.
• Origination fee — the lender's up-front charge as a percentage of the loan amount. Leave the box at 0 when the offer has no fee.

There is no field for a down payment, because a personal loan has none, and no field for collateral, because there is none of that either. What you enter is what the lender has offered; what comes back is what it costs.

Unsecured, Fixed, and Fully Amortizing

Three properties define the product this calculator models. Unsecured means no asset backs the debt. Fixed means the rate and the payment stay where they started. Fully amortizing means the last scheduled payment leaves nothing behind — no balloon, no residual, no surprise at the end of the term.

The interest is simple in the sense that matters here: it accrues on whatever is still owed, and paying the balance down faster reduces it. That is worth knowing before you meet a contract written on precomputed interest, which is a different animal and is covered further down.

The CFPB describes how the third one behaves: "In an amortizing loan, a percentage of your monthly payment is applied to the principal and to the interest", and "At the beginning of your loan term, more of your payment is generally applied toward the interest rather than the principal." On a short personal loan that tilt is mild. Month one of $15,000 at 11% over three years costs $137.50 in interest and puts $353.58 against the balance, so principal is winning from the very first payment — a long mortgage does not behave anything like that.

What People Borrow It For

Two uses account for most of this market. The first is turning revolving debt into installment debt: a card balance has no end date and a minimum payment that shrinks as the balance falls, while a personal loan has a fixed payment and a date on which it is finished. The second is a one-off cost — a repair, a move, a medical bill — where the alternative is carrying the same amount on a card indefinitely.

The consolidation case only works if the arithmetic survives contact with the fee. A loan that clears $14,250 of card debt while charging you for $15,000 has to beat the card rate by enough to cover that $750 as well — on these terms the fee alone is 5.3% of the balance it actually retires. Price the card and the loan separately before moving anything.

To see what the card would cost if you simply kept paying it down, and what the loan has to beat, work the balance through the Credit Card Payoff Calculator.

How Do You Calculate a Personal Loan Payment?

The payment comes from the standard monthly amortization formula — the same one behind a car loan or a mortgage. The origination fee appears nowhere in it. That is not an oversight in the arithmetic; it is how these loans are written, and it is the single fact that makes fee-bearing offers so hard to rank by eye.

The Formula, and the Three Lines the Fee Adds

Payment = P × i ÷ (1 − (1 + i)^−n)

P = loan amount, the full figure before any deduction
i = interest rate ÷ 100 ÷ 12      (the monthly rate)
n = term in years × 12            (the number of payments)

Total interest = Payment × n − P
Fee            = P × fee percent ÷ 100
Received       = P − Fee
True cost      = Total interest + Fee

• P stays at the full loan amount throughout. The fee reduces what arrives, never what the schedule is built on.
• i is a monthly decimal, not an annual percentage: 11% becomes 11 ÷ 100 ÷ 12 = 0.00916667.
• n counts months, not years: three years is 36 payments, seven years is 84.
• The last four lines are bookkeeping around the payment, not inputs to it — which is why every fee level produces the same monthly figure.

The bracketed part of the payment formula is an annuity factor. It answers one question: what fraction of the balance has to be handed over each month so that the interest is covered and the balance still lands exactly on zero after n months.

Step by Step

By hand it takes a minute on any calculator with a power key.

• Divide the annual rate by 100, then by 12. That is i.
• Multiply the term in years by 12. That is n.
• Raise (1 + i) to the power of −n, keeping every decimal you can.
• Subtract that from 1, then divide i by the result.
• Multiply by the loan amount. That is the monthly payment.
• Multiply the payment by n and subtract the loan amount. That is the total interest.
• Multiply the loan amount by the fee percentage and divide by 100. Subtract it from the loan amount for what you receive, and add it to the interest for the true cost.

Step three is where hand arithmetic goes astray, because the exponent is negative and the result has a long tail of decimals. The calculator carries the full precision, which is why its total interest figure does not always reconcile with its own rounded payment — a three-cent discrepancy explained at the end of the result section.

Worked Example: $15,000 at 11% Over Three Years

An unsecured loan of $15,000, quoted at 11%, repaid monthly for three years, with a 5% origination fee.

P = 15,000
i = 11 ÷ 100 ÷ 12 = 0.00916667
n = 3 × 12 = 36

Payment = 15,000 × 0.00916667 ÷ (1 − 1.00916667^−36)

Monthly payment

$491.08

Thirty-six of those payments run the total interest to $2,678.91. The 5% fee is $750, so $14,250 arrives while the schedule still runs on the full $15,000, and the true cost of borrowing lands at $3,428.91 against $14,250 actually received. Enter the same loan with no fee and the true cost falls to $2,678.91 on the full $15,000 — the payment stays at $491.08 either way.

Why the Payment Never Moves When the Fee Does

This is worth testing yourself, because it is counter-intuitive and it is the reason fee-bearing offers slip past people. Hold the amount, rate, and term where they are and change only the fee box. At 0%, at 5%, at 10%, the monthly figure is $491.08 and the total interest is $2,678.91 every single time.

Only two lines respond. The money received falls from $15,000 to $14,250 to $13,500, and the true cost climbs from $2,678.91 to $3,428.91 to $4,178.91. A borrower comparing offers on the payment alone is reading the one number the fee is guaranteed not to touch.

What an Origination Fee Does to the Real Rate

The CFPB defines the charge in its mortgage glossary as "what the lender charges the borrower for making the mortgage loan", and unsecured lenders use the same word for the same thing. Regulation Z explains why it moves the rate: the amount financed is worked out by taking the principal, subtracting any downpayment, adding other amounts financed, and then subtracting any prepaid finance charge. A fee taken out of the advance is exactly that kind of charge, so it shrinks the amount financed while leaving the payments alone.

That is the mechanism behind the disclosure rule borrowers are told to shop on. "The APR is the interest rate plus any additional fees charged by the lender", the CFPB writes, and it names "origination charges and other fees charged when the loan is made" among them. The regulation requires that figure to be disclosed as "the cost of your credit as a yearly rate" — a single number designed to make offers like the ones below comparable.

The Fee Ladder on a $15,000 Three-Year Loan

Every row is the same loan at 11% for three years. Only the fee percentage changes.

The first six columns are the calculator's own output. The last one is not on the page — it is the rate that makes 36 payments of $491.08 equal the money actually advanced, which is the same calculation behind a disclosed APR, and it is the honest way to read a fee. On these terms a 5% charge turns an 11% loan into a 14.58% loan: 3.58 percentage points of rate, sitting in one line of the paperwork.

The arithmetic checks out from the other direction too. Price a fee-free loan of $14,250 — the money that actually arrives — at 14.5837% over three years and it repays at $491.08 a month and costs $3,428.91 in interest, matching both the payment and the true cost line to the cent.

Why the Same Fee Costs More on a Short Loan

A fee is charged once; a rate is charged over time. Spread a fixed charge across fewer months and it converts into a bigger annual rate. These are fee-inclusive rates on a loan quoted at 11%, by term.

None of which makes a long term the better answer. It makes the fee a smaller share of a much larger bill, which is a different thing, and the term ladder further down puts a price on that trade.

One 5% fee adds 5.20 points to a two-year loan and 1.69 points to a seven-year one — the identical $750, priced more than three times as heavily by the shorter schedule. The same asymmetry shows up in dollars: on the two-year version that $750 is 29.7% of the entire $2,528.82 cost of borrowing, while on the seven-year version it is 10.2% of $7,324.27. If your term is short, the fee is the number to negotiate.

Entering the Fee Correctly

The box wants a percentage of the loan amount, and it is a text field rather than a number field, so it forgives punctuation and quietly discards everything that is not a digit or a decimal point. That flexibility helps in one direction and hurts in the other.

• Typing 5% works. The symbol is stripped and the entry reads as 5.
• Typing 750 because the fee is $750 on a $15,000 loan does not work. It reads as 750%, and the result reports a fee of $112,500 with negative money received.
• A minus sign is discarded along with everything else, so −5 becomes 5. There is no negative fee.
• An empty box counts as zero, exactly like typing 0. The result then says no origination fee was entered and reminds you that many lenders charge between 1% and 10%.
• A fee of 100 is accepted and returns $0 received — a sign that something was typed in the wrong units rather than a real offer.

Decimals are fine. A 1.5% fee on $15,000 reads as $225, leaving $14,775 in the account and a true cost of $2,903.91 at 11% over three years.

Personal Loan Chart: Cost per $10,000 Borrowed

The payment scales in a straight line with the amount borrowed, so one chart covers every loan size this tool can price. Each figure below is the calculator's own output for a $10,000 loan with the fee left at zero, across the four terms it offers.

Divide your loan amount by 10,000 and multiply the figure in your row. Borrowing $15,000 at 11% over three years is one and a half times the 11% row, and the calculator returns $491.08; $37,500 is 3.75 times that row, and the calculator returns $1,227.70. Work it by hand and expect to land a cent out, because the printed figure is already rounded: $327.39 × 3.75 comes to $1,227.71. The fee scales cleanly either way, so a 5% charge is $500 on the ten thousand and $750 on the fifteen.

The Same Chart, Read as Interest

A payment figure conceals the cost, which is the whole reason a longer term feels affordable. These are the total interest amounts on that same $10,000.

Read across a row and the term is doing the damage; read down a column and the rate is. At 11%, stretching from two years to seven multiplies the interest by 3.70, from $1,185.88 to $4,382.85. At three years, moving from 11% to 30% multiplies it by 2.96, from $1,785.94 to $5,282.57. Neither lever is small, but only one of them is usually negotiable.

The chart also works as a sanity check on a quote. If a lender's monthly figure sits well above the row for your rate and term, something is being financed that has not been mentioned — an insurance add-on, or a fee rolled into the balance rather than deducted from it.

Personal Loan Examples at Common Amounts

Personal loans cluster around round numbers. Every row here is priced at 11% over three years with a 5% origination fee, which is a middling shape for illustration rather than a prediction of what you will be offered.

Every column is a straight multiple of the one above it, which yields a handy constant: at these terms the loan costs 22.86 cents of interest and fee for every dollar borrowed, at $2,000 and at $50,000 alike. Change the rate or the term and that constant moves; change only the size and it does not.

The Term Ladder on $15,000

Term is the lever that moves the payment most, and the one that costs most to pull. All four rows are $15,000 at 11% with a 5% fee.

Two years out to seven cuts the payment by 63.3%, from $699.12 to $256.84, and multiplies the interest by 3.70. The relief is heavily front-loaded, though. The first step — two years to three — takes $208.04 a month off the bill and costs $900.09 in extra interest. The last step — five years to seven — takes only $69.30 off and costs $2,006.09. Somewhere in there the trade stops being worth making.

Watching a balance actually fall, month by month, and seeing what an overpayment does to the finish date, is a job for the Loan Repayment Calculator.

What One Point of Rate Is Worth

A single percentage point is worth much less than a year of term on the monthly figure, and much more than it looks on the total. Both columns below are $15,000 with the fee at zero.

On the three-year loan, going from 11% to 12% adds $7.13 a month and $256.82 in interest. On the seven-year loan the identical point adds $7.95 a month and $668.17 in interest — about 2.6 times the damage, for a monthly difference nobody would notice. The longer the loan, the more a fraction of a point is worth arguing about.

How to Read Your Result

The panel answers with a headline figure and three lines of breakdown. Nothing is auto-calculated when the page opens, because the amount and rate boxes start empty — the result appears once you have filled them in and pressed the button.

The Four Lines

For $15,000 at 11% over three years with a 5% fee, the panel reads:

• $491.08/month — the headline. Principal and interest, due every month for the whole term.
• $15,000 at 11% for 3 years — total interest $2,678.91 — a restatement of what was entered, and the interest that follows from it.
• Origination fee 5% = $750: you receive $14,250 but repay on the full $15,000 — the fee in dollars, and the gap it opens.
• True cost of borrowing: $3,428.91 (interest + fee) on $14,250 actually received — the two costs added together, set against the money that arrived.

Leave the fee at zero and the third line becomes a note that many lenders charge 1–10%, taken from the disbursement, while the fourth falls back to the interest alone on the full amount. Round dollar amounts print without cents, which is why the fee shows as $750 rather than $750.00.

There is a copy button on the panel that lifts the headline and all three breakdown lines as plain text, which is the quickest way to put two offers side by side somewhere you can see them together.

Where the Money Goes Month by Month

No schedule is printed, but every month of one follows from the payment. Interest for a month is the balance at the start of it multiplied by 0.11 ÷ 12, and whatever is left of the $491.08 comes off the balance. On the $15,000 three-year loan:

Halfway through in time is not halfway through in money. After 18 of the 36 payments the balance is still $8,114.55, so 45.9% of the debt has gone while 72.9% of the interest has already been paid. Refinancing or settling at that point costs more than the calendar suggests, and the gap widens with the term: at the halfway mark of the seven-year version — 42 payments in — $8,919.84 is still owed on the same $15,000, only 40.5% of it cleared.

Rounding, and the Last Payment

The payment is displayed to the cent; the true figure is $491.0807567… and the total interest line is calculated from that rather than from the rounded version. So the two do not quite reconcile: 36 × $491.08 comes to $17,678.88, while $15,000 plus the stated $2,678.91 comes to $17,678.91.

Three cents over three years is not worth a thought, but the principle is. Any total built by multiplying a displayed payment by the number of months is accurate to about a payment, not to the cent, and a lender's payoff quote will differ too — the final installment in a real schedule is normally adjusted to clear whatever is actually left.

How to Compare Two Personal Loan Offers

Collecting offers is cheap if you collect them the right way. The CFPB separates the two kinds of credit check: hard inquiries are the ones lenders run "after you apply for credit to help them decide whether they will approve your loan or credit", while soft inquiries "will not affect your credit scores." Pre-qualification is normally the soft kind, and it is what produces a rate and a fee you can actually type into this page rather than a guess.

Equal Amount Borrowed Is Not Equal Money Received

Five offers on a $15,000 loan over three years, each entered exactly as quoted, sorted from cheapest monthly payment to dearest.

Sorted by payment the list runs top to bottom. Sorted by true cost it runs close to the other way: the cheapest payment, $483.94, belongs to the most expensive loan on the page, and the dearest payment, $505.41, belongs to the second cheapest. The total interest column is just as misleading — the 9.99% offer has the lowest interest of the five and still costs the most.

The Fair Comparison: Same Money in Hand

That table would be dishonest to leave standing on its own, because the five loans do not deliver the same thing. One hands over $13,800 and another $15,000, so their payments are buying different amounts of money. Fix it by borrowing enough that exactly $15,000 lands: for a fee of f percent, enter 15,000 ÷ (1 − f ÷ 100) as the loan amount.

Now the two orderings agree with each other, and both agree with the fee-inclusive rate column from the previous table. That is the actual lesson here: comparing payments is not wrong in principle, it is wrong when the amounts received differ. Either gross every offer up so the same money reaches you, or ignore the payments and rank on the fee-inclusive rate. Ranking equal amounts borrowed by their monthly figure is what produced the near-backwards order in the table above, and it will do it again whenever the fees differ.

Whether a lender will let you gross up is a separate question — some cap the amount, some will not lend odd figures — but the calculation tells you what the offer is really worth either way.

Where the Rate Comes From, and Where to Look

Price on this product is mostly a function of your credit file. "Higher scores reflect a better credit history and make you eligible for lower interest rates", as the CFPB puts it in its mortgage guidance, and unsecured lending works the same way with a wider spread, because nothing is standing behind the loan if it goes bad.

Some of the ceiling is written into law rather than negotiated. The CFPB names state interest rate laws among the things that decide your terms, and federal credit unions carry a statutory cap of their own: the Federal Credit Union Act "generally limits federal credit unions to a 15-percent interest rate ceiling on loans", and the NCUA Board has kept a temporary 18-percent ceiling running through September 10, 2027, with payday alternative loans allowed up to 28 percent. That matters when a quote lands near the bottom of the chart above. On $15,000 over three years, 18% costs $542.29 a month and $4,522.29 in interest, against $636.77 and $7,923.85 at 30% — a gap of $3,401.56 on the same money. Membership is the catch, and eligibility rules vary by institution.

Ask every lender for two things in writing: the origination fee as a percentage, and the APR. The first is what you type into the fee box; the second is the regulated figure that already folds the fee in, so it is the fastest cross-check on the rate the ladder above implies.

If the money is going toward a vehicle, dealer and captive financing is a separate market with its own structure, priced in the Auto Loan Calculator.

Costs This Page Cannot See

The origination fee is the only charge modeled here, and it is not the only charge that exists. Late fees, returned-payment fees, optional credit insurance, and autopay rate discounts all sit outside the calculation, and none of them appear in the true cost line.

Prepayment penalties belong on that list too. The CFPB defines one as "a fee that some lenders charge if you pay off all or part of your mortgage early", and the same clause can appear in an unsecured contract, so search for it before you plan around an early payoff. The related trap is precomputed interest, where the total finance charge is fixed at signing rather than accruing on the balance — under that structure, paying early saves far less than the schedule above implies, and this calculator does not model it.

Limits: When This Calculator Does Not Apply

The arithmetic is exact for what it covers: a fixed-rate, fully amortizing, monthly-paid unsecured loan carrying a single origination fee deducted from the advance. Each item below is a case where that description stops fitting, and the number on screen starts answering a different question.

Only Four Terms, and Only Monthly Payments

The term control offers two, three, five, and seven years and nothing else, so 48-month and 72-month offers cannot be entered exactly. Neither can a biweekly schedule, which is not the same thing as monthly payments however it is described.

The gap is not trivial. At 11% on $15,000, a genuine four-year loan is $387.68 a month with $3,608.78 of interest — well inside the $491.08 of the three-year row and the $326.14 of the five-year one, and closer to neither. A six-year loan is $285.51 with $5,556.81. Bracketing between the two nearest rows tells you roughly where you are, and no more than that.

For a term entered in whole or fractional years, and for quarterly or annual repayment schedules, the general-purpose version is the Loan Calculator.

A Blank Rate Field Is Not an Error

Leave the loan amount empty and the panel refuses, with a notice reading "Enter the loan amount". Leave the interest rate empty and it does not refuse: an empty rate box reads as zero, and the calculator returns a real 0% schedule. On $15,000 over three years that is $416.67 a month with total interest of $0 — a correct answer to a question nobody asked.

The field does reject the impossible. Anything below 0 or above 100 comes back as "Enter the interest rate". But zero itself is a legitimate entry, because promotional 0% financing exists and the formula divides the balance evenly across the term when it sees one. Check your rate is actually in the box before you trust a payment that looks too good.

Structures This Does Not Represent

In each of these, the figure here is not slightly off. It is modeling something else.

• A fee added to the balance instead of deducted from the advance. Some lenders finance the origination charge, so you receive the full amount and repay a larger one. This page always takes the fee out of what arrives.
• Variable and adjustable rates. The payment holds only for as long as the rate does, and nothing here reprices it.
• Precomputed interest, where the finance charge is fixed at signing rather than accruing on a falling balance.
• Extra payments. There is no field for overpaying, and no output for the finish date one would buy.
• Anything secured. A loan against a house or a car is a different product at a different price, and the collateral is the whole reason for the difference.
• Balance-transfer and promotional structures, where the rate changes partway through the term.

Homeowners weighing an unsecured loan against a secured one should price both, because the rate gap is usually large and the risk gap is larger — start with the Home Equity Calculator.

It Cannot Tell You Whether You Will Be Approved

This page prices a loan; it does not underwrite one. Lenders test affordability with the debt-to-income ratio, which the CFPB defines as "all your monthly debt payments divided by your gross monthly income" — their worked example puts $2,000 of monthly debt against $6,000 of gross income for a ratio of 33 percent. There is no universal cutoff: "Different loan products and lenders will have different DTI limits."

Run the payment through your own budget before you sign, and weigh it as a fixed obligation rather than an average one. The rate is fixed, the term is fixed, and the payment is due in the months when everything else has gone wrong as well as in the months when it has not.