What this page is for
Personal loans are often short, fixed-rate loans for a purchase, a repair or a move, repaid in equal monthly amounts. This page works out that monthly amount, the interest you’d pay over the term and how the balance comes down, so a quote’s numbers are easy to check.
How to use it
- Replace 10,000 with the amount you want to borrow.
- Type the yearly interest rate the lender quotes.
- Type the term, in years or, under Term in, in months.
- Read the payment and totals, then select Copy result to keep them. The starting values, 10,000 at 12% a year over 3 years, are examples that give the page a result, not a quote. The page opens at them on every visit, so type the lender’s figures over them.
A worked example
At the starting values, the first 35 payments are 332.14 each and the 36th, the last, is 332.28 after rounding to the cent. The payments total 11,957.18, so the loan costs 1,957.18 in interest. In the first year, 1,041.56 of the 3,985.68 paid is interest; in the second, 668.18.
What moves the payment
- Term: a shorter term means bigger payments and less interest; a longer one, smaller payments and more interest in total.
- Rate: at 12% a year, a twelfth of that, 1%, is charged each month on the balance still owed.
- Amount: double the amount and the payment roughly doubles.
What it leaves out
Origination or arrangement fees, insurance, taxes, early repayment charges and rate changes aren’t part of the result. The result shows the formula with the numbers you typed; the loan EMI calculator page sets out how it’s worked out.
Limits
Amounts from 100 to 1,000,000,000,000 work, as do rates of 0% to 100% a year (to 0.01) and terms from 1 to 50 years or 1 to 600 months.
Privacy
The amounts you type are calculated on your device and stay there. Your Schedule choice is the only thing the calculator saves from your inputs, in this browser’s storage.