Debt Payoff Planner
A free debt payoff calculator that builds snowball and avalanche plans for multiple debts — see your debt-free date, total interest, and a month-by-month schedule.
Debt Payoff Calculator
List your debts, add any extra you can pay each month, and pick a strategy. All math runs in your browser — your debts and numbers are never sent to our servers.
Balance over time
Month-by-month plan
| Month | Total payment | Per-debt allocation | Remaining balances |
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How to use the debt payoff calculator
This debt payoff calculator works from the numbers you enter. List each debt with its balance, APR, and required minimum payment, add any extra amount you can put toward debt each month, and choose a strategy. The tool then builds a complete debt payoff plan: the month you become debt-free, the total interest you'll pay, and a full month-by-month schedule.
Because every debt is just a balance and a rate, the same tool serves many needs. It's a credit card payoff calculator and a credit card debt payoff calculator when your debts are cards, a pay down debt calculator or calculator to pay off debt for any mix of loans and cards, and a quick debt payoff estimator when you only want a ballpark. Use it as a debt repayment calculator to test how a bigger extra payment shortens the timeline, or as a paying off loan early calculator to see the interest you'd save by overpaying.
If you carry a card balance, enter the minimum your statement requires; the built-in credit card minimum payment calculator and credit card payment payoff calculator logic pays that minimum every month and aims your extra at the target debt. Whether you think of it as a cc payoff calculator or a paying down credit card calculator, the steps are the same — fill in the rows and press Build my plan.
Snowball vs avalanche method
The snowball and avalanche methods both pay every debt's minimum and then throw every spare dollar at one target debt — they just choose the target differently. The debt snowball calculator orders your debts from the smallest balance to the largest and clears the smallest first. The debt avalanche calculator orders them from the highest APR to the lowest and attacks the most expensive interest first.
Mathematically, the avalanche always pays the least total interest, because it kills high-rate balances soonest. The snowball usually costs a little more interest but eliminates whole debts faster at the start, which many people find motivating. This tool is both a snowball method calculator and a debt snowball method calculator, and it can run the avalanche too — use the "Compare both" option to see the difference in dollars and months for your exact debts.
Debt snowball method explained
The debt snowball method is a repayment order, not a special loan. You make the minimum payment on every debt, then send all of your extra money to the debt with the smallest balance. When that smallest debt is gone, the money you were paying on it — its minimum plus your extra — rolls onto the next-smallest balance. The amount aimed at each successive debt grows like a snowball rolling downhill.
The appeal is behavioral: knocking out a full debt early gives you a visible win and frees up a payment, which keeps many people going. The schedule above shows exactly when each debt disappears so you can see the wins land month by month.
Debt avalanche method explained
The debt avalanche method uses the same roll-over mechanic but targets the highest interest rate first. You pay every minimum, then direct all extra money at the debt with the highest APR. Once it's cleared, that freed-up payment cascades onto the debt with the next-highest rate, and so on down the line.
Because interest is what makes debt expensive, clearing the highest-rate balance first minimizes the total interest you pay and, in most cases, gets you out of debt a bit sooner than the snowball. The trade-off is patience: if your highest-rate debt also has a large balance, it can take a while before you fully eliminate your first debt.
How to calculate debt payoff in Excel
You can reproduce this plan in a debt payoff spreadsheet. Set up one row per month with columns for each debt's balance. Each month, add interest with balance × (APR / 12), subtract that month's payment, and carry the new balance to the next row. Direct the minimums to every debt and the extra to your target debt, then roll a debt's payment to the next once its balance hits zero.
A debt snowball spreadsheet built this way will match the figures here, but it takes careful formulas and a lot of manual upkeep whenever a balance or rate changes. The calculator above runs the same month-by-month simulation for you.