When you find yourself owing a debt, you can devise a plan to pay the debt off by making regular payments. Use this calculator to see how long it will take to pay off a debt, based on a fixed monthly payment.

In testing various scenarios, study the trade-off between the amount of each monthly payment, and how long it will take to pay off your debt. For monthly cash flow purposes, you must be able to make the monthly payments, so you don't want them to be more than you can afford. But the smaller the monthly payment, the longer it will take to pay off the total debt, and the more dollars you will pay over the long-term.

Enter the amount of debt that you need to pay off. You do not need to enter a dollar sign, just the numeric amount of the loan.

Please enter the amount of the debt. 0 is not a valid debt amount to be repaid.

Enter the annual interest rate for that is being charged on this debt, such as 4.2 for 4.2%. Be sure to enter the annual interest rate, in the format that is shown. You don't need to enter the percent sign.

Enter the amount that you plan to pay each month toward retiring the debt.

As the monthly payment increases, the time required to pay off the entire debt decreases, as does the total amount that you will pay while paying off the debt.

Please enter the amount of your planned monthly payment. 0 is not a valid amount.

This table shows a summary of the important financial characteristics of this debt repayment, including a re-cap of the three inputs: original debt amount, annual interest rate, and planned monthly payment.

The table shows the number of months required to pay off the debt (including interest), plus the total interest paid and the total dollars paid. Study these values as you perform "what-if analysis" by varying the planned monthly payment in your inputs.

This Debt Repayment Schedule shows the month-by-month repayment of your original debt, with one row per monthly payment. Each payment pays the current interest owed, with the remainder of the payment going toward debt reduction (paying down the debt balance).

The final payment may be different from the prior fixed payments. The final payment will be whatever amount is required to pay off the debt, down to the cent.