When will my credit card be paid off?

The model is a month-by-month ledger. Each month the balance accrues interest at one twelfth of the APR, your payment lands, and whatever exceeds the interest reduces the balance. Because the balance shrinks, every later month charges less interest and more of the same payment becomes principal, so payoff accelerates toward the end. The one hard line: a payment at or below the first month's interest never wins. On the default inputs that line sits at $92.29 a month.

Here is the default $5,000 balance at the published average APR across payments people actually consider. Change any input above and the page recomputes as you type.

The relationship is sharply nonlinear near the bottom. Doubling the smallest payment in the table cuts the schedule by far more than half, because the first dollars of every payment are consumed by interest and only the dollars above that line do any work. The cheapest month of interest you will ever buy is the one closest to the interest-only threshold.

The CFPB's 2025 Consumer Credit Card Market Report finds the most common minimum payment formula is 1% of the balance plus finance charges and fees, with a $40 floor. This page runs that exact formula month by month next to your fixed payment. The minimum is designed to be payable, not to pay anything off: it hands the interest to the issuer and retires about one percent of what you owe, and because it shrinks as the balance shrinks, the principal it retires shrinks too.

On the default inputs the two paths are not close. The first minimum on $5,000 at 22.15% is $142.29, and paying only the minimum takes 184 months (15 years 4 months) and $7,516 of interest, more than the balance itself. A flat $200 instead finishes in 34 months with $1,768 of interest. Same card, same rate, same starting debt: $5,748 and 12 years 6 months of difference, purely from holding the payment flat instead of letting it shrink.

This is an illustration of a common formula, not your card's terms. Issuers vary the percentage, the floor, and what counts as fees; your cardholder agreement states the formula that applies to you, and your statement's payoff disclosure box runs your issuer's own numbers.

Working backward is often the more useful direction: pick the month you want the card gone and solve for the payment. Here is the level payment that retires the default $5,000 balance at 22.15% on each schedule, rounded up to the cent so the target actually lands.

Halving the time does not double the payment, because a shorter schedule gives interest less time to accrue. The same table for your own balance and rate appears in the JSON twin under requiredPayment, and the drivers under the result price the other two moves: a lower APR and a smaller balance.

New purchases. The model assumes the card sits in a drawer while you pay it down; every swipe adds principal at the full APR and pushes the payoff month out. If the card is still in daily use, treat the result as the payoff of today's balance, not of the account.

Promotional and deferred-interest APRs. A 0% window changes the arithmetic entirely, and a deferred-interest plan can charge the whole accrued balance retroactively if a single month slips past the promotion's end. This page models one constant APR; enter the rate that will actually apply for the months you are modeling.

Fees and daily accrual. Annual fees and late fees add principal the model does not see. Real cards also accrue interest daily on the average daily balance rather than monthly on a point-in-time balance, so your statement's figures will differ slightly from the ledger here; the direction and the shape of the answer hold, and the statement governs.

Other debts. This page prices one card. When several cards compete for the same dollars, the order you pay them in changes the total interest, and ranking them by APR is a different calculation than this page runs. A fixed-rate loan that amortizes on a set schedule is the loan payment calculator's territory.

This calculator is built to be used without a browser. Every input is a query parameter on this page, and the same parameters on the JSON twin return the complete answer as a document.

GET /tools/credit-card-payoff.json?balance=8000&apr=22.15&payment=300

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with the payoff month, total interest and total paid, the interest-only threshold, the minimum path for comparison, requiredPayment for 12 to 48 month targets, plus sensitivity tables by payment and by target months. A payment that never retires the balance reports null months with a warning, drivers ranked by effect with a plain sentence each, assumptions that say for every field whether you supplied it and which source the default came from, sources with URLs and as-of dates, warnings, a disclaimer, and in tool the canonicalUrl and jsonUrl that carry only your non-default parameters. The canonical URL is the answer's permanent address; use it when you cite the number.

Parameters, all optional, in any order:

• balance ($), default $5,000.
• apr (%), default 22.15%, from Federal Reserve, G.19 Consumer Credit (June 2026 data).
• payment ($ per month), default $200 per month.

Values accept plain numbers and loose human formats such as 100k, $100,000, or 6.5%. Unknown parameters are ignored, values outside a field's range are clamped and reported in warnings, and the endpoint never fails on bad input. Responses are cacheable for a day; the defaults change when their sources publish, and tool.version changes when the method does.

• Federal Reserve, G.19 Consumer Credit (June 2026 data), as of 2026-08-07. Commercial bank interest rates, May 2026: 24-month personal loans 11.86%; 60-month new car loans 7.14%; credit card accounts assessed interest 22.15%.
• CFPB, Consumer Credit Card Market Report 2025, as of 2025-12-01. Section 4.1.1: the most common minimum payment formula is 1 percent of the balance plus finance charges and fees; the most common fixed floor was $40.

Default values on this page: APR 22.15% (Federal Reserve, G.19 Consumer Credit (June 2026 data)). The minimum-payment comparison uses the most common formula in CFPB, Consumer Credit Card Market Report 2025. The balance and payment defaults are examples.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of a payoff date on an example card it can see your actual balance, watch the payments land, and fold the payoff into your savings rate and the rest of your plan. Text it the question.

ask carlo anything(415) 376-5678