Credit Card Payoff Calculator
Enter your cards and one monthly budget to see your debt-free date, the interest each payoff order costs, and what the cheaper order actually saves.
Monthly payoff budget $600 · Card 1 balance $6,200 · Card 1 APR 24.99% · +13 moreYour figuresEdit figures
Everything you can put toward cards each month
What you owe on this card
The purchase rate on the statement
The minimum the issuer requires
Leave at 0 if unused
The purchase rate on the statement
The minimum the issuer requires
Leave at 0 if unused
The purchase rate on the statement
The minimum the issuer requires
Leave at 0 if unused
The purchase rate on the statement
The minimum the issuer requires
Leave at 0 if unused
The purchase rate on the statement
The minimum the issuer requires
Interest saved by avalanche
Paying highest-rate first saves you $180 in interest compared with paying smallest-balance first.
Example figures — replace them with your own.
- Total balance today
- $10,800
- Minimum payments required
- $275
- Interest saved by avalanche
- $180
- Months saved by avalanche
- 0 months
Debt-free in 1 year 11 months with avalanche — 1 year 11 months with snowball.
| Scenario | AvalancheBetter | Snowball |
|---|---|---|
| Debt-free in | 23 months | 23 months |
| Interest paid | $2,544 | $2,724 |
| Total paid | $13,344 | $13,524 |
Method: Monthly-accrual payoff simulation, avalanche compared against snowball
- Each APR is fixed for the whole payoff. No promotional or introductory rate, and no penalty rate after a missed payment, is modelled.
- Interest accrues first, on the balance carried into the month, at APR divided by twelve; minimums are paid next, then the rest of the budget goes to one target card.
- Minimum payments are held FLAT at the figure you enter. A real issuer recalculates the minimum downward as the balance falls; this model does not.
- No annual fees, late fees, transfer fees, cash-advance charges or new purchases are included, and payments are assumed to post on time every month.
- No tax table is used. Figures are estimates for comparing payoff orders, not a statement from your issuer or financial advice.
No tax rates are used in this calculation.
This is an estimate, not financial or tax advice. Confirm figures with the linked source or a licensed professional before acting on them.
How this calculator applies your money, month by month
Two payoff orders are compared here, and they differ in exactly one respect. Avalanche sends every spare dollar to the card with the highest interest rate. Snowball sends it to the card with the smallest balance. Everything else is identical: the same cards, the same budget, the same minimum payments, the same month.
The sequence inside each month matters more than most people expect, and it is worth stating plainly because tools disagree about it and the totals they report diverge as a result. This one accrues interest first. At the start of every month each card is charged its annual rate divided by twelve, applied to the balance carried into that month, and that charge is added to the balance. Only then is money applied: first the minimum payment on every card, capped at the balance so a card can never be pushed into a credit, and then whatever remains of your budget, all of it, on the single target card the strategy has chosen. If that card reaches zero partway through the month, the leftover cascades straight onto the next target rather than sitting idle until the following statement.
Accruing before paying is the conservative reading, and it matches how a card that is already revolving actually behaves — the statement balance has been charged interest by the time your payment posts. A calculator that pays first and charges interest on the remainder will report a smaller total for the same inputs. Neither convention is wrong, but a number without its convention is not comparable to anything, so this page names the one it uses.
The rollover is the part worth understanding, because it is the entire engine of both methods and it is easy to miss. Nothing in this model explicitly moves a retired card's minimum payment anywhere. Your monthly outlay is pinned to the budget you entered, and the minimums are paid first out of it. So when a card reaches zero it simply stops consuming its minimum, and that money falls through automatically into the pool aimed at the next target. Each payoff makes the following payoff faster, and the one after that faster still. That accelerating cascade is what the word snowball describes, and avalanche uses precisely the same mechanism pointed at a different card. If you paid each card in isolation, the plan would take dramatically longer, and the difference is not small.
One consequence of pinning the outlay to a budget is that the budget has to cover the sum of the minimums before any of this can begin. If it does not, there is no payoff plan at any order, and this page says so in words rather than printing a schedule that quietly never ends.
Avalanche wins the arithmetic; snowball wins the follow-through
Avalanche is not merely usually cheaper. For a fixed monthly outlay it is provably the cheapest order there is. Every dollar you have is going to be spent this month regardless of where you send it, so the only question is which balance it stops from accruing. A dollar retiring debt at twenty-eight percent removes more future interest than the same dollar retiring debt at nineteen, and that is true in every month and for every card. The result never reverses, which is why the interest saved on this page is never a negative number.
Snowball loses that comparison and is still the right answer for a great many people, for a reason arithmetic does not capture. Clearing a whole account is a discrete, visible, unambiguous event. The statement stops coming. The number of things you owe money on drops by one. Research on debt repayment has repeatedly found that the count of accounts closed predicts whether people stay with a plan better than the amount of money they save, and a plan abandoned in month nine costs infinitely more than a slightly suboptimal plan carried to completion.
So read the gap rather than the ranking. If the difference between the two is small relative to your total balance, take the order you will actually stick to, and take it without guilt — the saving you forfeit is the price of a plan that finishes. If the gap is large, which usually means one card is carrying a much higher rate than the others, the arithmetic deserves more weight, and a reasonable compromise is to clear one small balance first for the momentum and then switch to strict avalanche for everything after it.
What a minimum payment actually is, and why it shrinks
A credit card minimum is not a fixed instalment. It is typically the larger of a small percentage of the current statement balance — commonly one to three percent, plus that month's interest and any fees — or a flat floor of around twenty-five or thirty-five dollars, whichever is greater. Because the percentage side is computed from the balance, the required minimum falls every month that the balance falls.
That is the trap, and it is designed rather than accidental. Paying the minimum feels like keeping up, but a shrinking payment against a balance that is still accruing interest at twenty-plus percent stretches the payoff over an extraordinary span. The typical illustration on a statement, which issuers in the United States are legally required to print, routinely shows a mid-four-figure balance taking somewhere between fifteen and thirty years to clear at the minimum, with total interest exceeding the original balance. The debt is not being retired; it is being maintained.
This calculator holds the minimum you enter flat for the life of the card rather than recalculating it downward each month. That is deliberate and it is the assumption that fits the tool's purpose. You are committing to a total monthly budget, not to whatever each issuer happens to demand, so a shrinking minimum would only reshuffle money between cards inside a total that never changes — and it would slightly understate the payoff date for anyone who does the sensible thing and keeps paying the same amount as the balance falls. Enter today's minimum from your statement and treat the figure as a floor, not a plan.
Balance transfers, promotional rates and the fee people forget
A zero percent balance transfer can beat any payoff order, because it attacks the rate rather than the sequence. Move a balance to a card charging nothing for eighteen months and every payment is principal for eighteen months. Nothing in avalanche or snowball comes close to that.
The catch is in the details, and there are three. First, the transfer fee, usually three to five percent of the amount moved, is charged up front and added to the transferred balance — five thousand moved at four percent is five thousand two hundred owed. Second, the promotional rate expires on a fixed date, and whatever balance remains on that date reverts to the card's ordinary rate, which is often higher than the one you left. Third, purchases made on the new card may not share the promotional rate at all, and payments are typically applied to the lowest-rate portion of the balance first, so a card used for spending during the promotion can accrue interest you did not expect.
The test is simple. Divide the transferred amount by the number of promotional months and ask whether you can genuinely pay that every month. If yes, the transfer is close to free money and this calculator understates what you can do. If no, model it as the rate you will actually be paying after the promotion ends, with the fee added to the balance, and compare that against staying put. This tool models no promotional periods and no fees at all — every rate you enter runs unchanged for the whole payoff — so a transfer is something to evaluate beside these numbers, not inside them.
Reading your result, and the cases where there is no answer
Three outcomes are possible and only one of them is a schedule. If your budget covers the minimums and the debt clears, you get a debt-free month count for each order, the interest each one costs, and the difference. If your budget is below the sum of the minimums, there is no plan at any order, and the page says so instead of producing a schedule that never terminates — the fix is more budget, a hardship arrangement with the issuer, or a consolidation, not a different ordering. If the minimums are covered but the interest still outruns the payments, the balance never reaches zero, and that is reported as such too.
The simulation is capped at a hundred years of months, and the cap can never be the reason you see a number: reaching it is reported as never clearing, and the partial totals are discarded rather than shown. A payoff plan that quietly truncates at some arbitrary horizon and prints a total is worse than no answer, because it looks like one.
Two habits make any of these numbers real. Stop adding new charges to the cards you are paying down, because new spending accrues at the same rate and silently resets the plan the calculator just built. And raise the budget rather than the effort: an extra fifty a month changes the result far more than any resequencing does, which is the quiet lesson of comparing avalanche against snowball and finding the gap smaller than you hoped.
Frequently asked questions
Is the debt avalanche always cheaper than the debt snowball?
For a fixed monthly budget, yes, and it is a provable result rather than a rule of thumb. The same total leaves your account each month under both orders, so the only variable is which balance stops accruing interest, and a dollar applied to a higher rate always removes more future interest than the same dollar applied to a lower one. The saving reported on this page is therefore never negative. The two orders tie only when every card carries the same rate, or when the highest-rate card also happens to be the smallest balance.
Why does my budget have to cover the sum of the minimum payments?
Because below that threshold there is no payoff plan to compute, in any order. The minimums are contractual, so a budget short of their total means at least one card goes unpaid every month, accruing interest and late fees on a balance that grows rather than shrinks. This calculator reports that case as a distinct result instead of producing a schedule, because a schedule that never terminates looks like an answer and is not one. The remedies are a larger budget, a hardship plan with the issuer, or consolidation, not a different payoff order.
Does interest get charged before or after my payment in this model?
Before. Each month every card is charged its annual rate divided by twelve, applied to the balance carried into that month, and that interest is added to the balance. Only then are minimums paid and the remaining budget applied to the target card. This is the conservative convention and matches a card that is already revolving, where the statement balance has been charged interest by the time your payment posts. Tools that pay first and accrue on the remainder report lower totals for identical inputs, which is why the convention is stated rather than assumed.
What happens to a card's minimum payment once that card is paid off?
It rolls into the next card automatically, and that rollover is the entire mechanism behind both strategies. Your total monthly outlay stays pinned to the budget you entered, and the minimums come out of it first, so a card reaching zero simply stops consuming its minimum and that money falls through to whichever card the strategy targets next. Each payoff accelerates the one after it. Without the rollover, paying cards in isolation, the same total budget would take substantially longer to clear the same debt.
How long does it take to pay off a card making only the minimum payment?
Frequently between fifteen and thirty years on a mid-four-figure balance, with total interest that can exceed the amount originally borrowed. The reason is that a minimum is usually a small percentage of the current balance subject to a flat floor, so it shrinks every month the balance shrinks, while interest keeps accruing at the full rate. United States issuers are legally required to print this illustration on your statement. Paying a fixed amount instead of a shrinking one is the single change that converts maintenance into repayment.
Should I do a balance transfer instead of just picking a payoff order?
Possibly, because a transfer attacks the interest rate rather than the sequence, and no ordering can beat zero percent. Weigh three things first: the transfer fee of roughly three to five percent charged up front and added to the balance, the fixed date the promotional rate expires and reverts, and the fact that new purchases on that card usually do not share the promotional rate. Divide the amount moved by the promotional months and confirm you can genuinely pay that. This calculator models no fees and no promotional periods.
Why does this calculator only allow five cards?
Because the shared calculator framework these pages are built on takes a fixed list of named input fields and encodes them in the query string one by one, with no repeating-group syntax available. Five slots was chosen as the practical ceiling for a form that still fits on one screen and a shareable link that stays legible. If you carry more than five cards, combine the smallest ones into a single slot using their combined balance, their combined minimum, and the highest rate among them, which keeps the estimate conservative.
Do I need to stop using my credit cards while paying them down?
For these numbers to hold, effectively yes on the cards in the plan. Every new purchase accrues at the same rate as the balance you are attacking and quietly resets the payoff date the calculator just produced, because the model assumes no new charges after today. If you need a card for ongoing expenses, keep one outside the plan and pay it in full every month so it never revolves, or shift day-to-day spending to a debit card until the schedule finishes.