Which debt should I pay off first?

One budget, month by month. The budget is the sum of your minimum payments plus the extra you enter, and it stays the same every month until the last debt is gone. Each month, every open debt accrues one twelfth of its annual rate on its balance and receives its minimum payment. Whatever is left of the budget goes to a single focus debt: the highest rate under the avalanche, the smallest balance under the snowball. When a debt reaches zero, its minimum joins the pool and the focus moves to the next one, which is why the plan accelerates as it goes.

The calculator runs that ledger twice on the same list, once in each order, and reports both. The headline date is the avalanche because it is the order that minimizes interest, but the snowball's date and interest are right beside it, along with the signed difference, so the choice is priced rather than preached.

The rates on the example list are published statistics: the Federal Reserve's G.19 averages for credit card accounts assessed interest (22.15%), a 24-month personal loan (11.86%), and a 60-month new car loan (7.14%). The balances and minimum payments in that list are examples to be replaced with yours. Every figure on this page and in the JSON twin comes from one function, so the two never drift.

On the example list, $18,500 of debt carries $470 a month of minimum payments and accrues $246 of interest in the first month. Paying only the minimums clears it in 60 months at a cost of $9,286. Here is what adding a fixed amount on top does to the same list.

The months column falls faster than the extra payment rises, and that is the whole argument for the rolling budget. Going from minimums only to $500 a month extra cuts 60 months to 22 and saves $6,672 of interest, because each retired account hands its minimum to the next one instead of leaving your budget.

Only when the two orders pick different targets. On the example list they do: the credit card is the most expensive debt and the largest balance, so paying by rate goes after it first, while paying by balance clears the $3,500 car loan at 7.14% first and leaves the 22.15% card running. That choice costs $1,228 and 2 months.

The argument disappears when your most expensive debt is also your smallest, because then both methods want the same account first. Move the example to a $6,000 card at 22.15%, a $8,000 personal loan at 11.86%, and a $14,000 car loan at 7.14%, keeping the same $200 extra, and the two names describe one plan: May 2030 and $5,843 of interest either way. That is a common shape, and it is worth knowing when the argument does not apply to you.

Whether that price is worth paying is a question about you, not about the arithmetic. People who have abandoned payoff plans before often do better with an early win. The calculator's job is to tell you what the win costs, in this month and in these dollars, so it is a decision rather than a slogan.

The calculator ranks its own drivers above, for the list you entered. The steps are the ones people actually have: another hundred dollars a month, a thousand dollars thrown at the worst balance today, five points off the worst rate.

The extra payment is the lever with the widest range. It is the only input you set directly, and the table above shows it compounding: the budget that starts as minimums plus your extra ends as your whole former minimum payment attacking the last debt.

A lump sum aimed at the highest rate does double duty: it removes the balance and it removes every month of interest that balance would have accrued while it waited its turn. A tax refund or a bonus is worth more here than the same money spread over a year.

The rate is the one you can sometimes negotiate away. A balance transfer, a personal loan that consolidates a card, or a hardship rate from the issuer changes the arithmetic without changing your budget. Enter the new rate on the debt and the page recomputes as you type; the transfer fee is not modeled, so subtract it from the saving yourself.

Your minimum payments. Card minimums are usually a percentage of the balance plus finance charges, subject to a floor, so they fall as the balance falls; this model holds whatever minimum you enter level for the whole plan. That makes the minimums-only case here optimistic against a real card, where the shrinking minimum stretches the payoff much further. Installment loans, which have a fixed payment by contract, match the model closely.

New spending. The plan assumes nothing is added to any balance again. A card you keep using is not the debt this calculator retires. It also does not model promotional or teaser rates expiring, variable rates moving, deferred interest, late fees, balance transfer fees, or the tax deductibility of student loan or mortgage interest.

Whether paying debt is the right use of the money. An employer match on a retirement contribution, an emergency fund that keeps the next surprise off a card, and a debt at a rate below what savings earn all have claims on the same dollar. This page prices one question: given that you are paying debt, what does the order and the amount buy you.

It is arithmetic, not credit counseling. Debt settlement, bankruptcy, and negotiated hardship plans change the balances themselves and are outside this model.

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/debt-payoff.json?extra=400&debts=Credit+card%3A6000%3A22.15%3A120%2CCar+loan%3A14000%3A7.14%3A260

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with the totals, and under avalanche and snowball each method's months, debtFreeDate, totalInterest and the order in which the debts retire, plus deltaMonths and deltaInterest between them, and sensitivity over the extra payment, 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:

• extra ($ per month), default $200 per month.
• debts (a list), default the example list of 3 debts totalling $18,500, from Federal Reserve, G.19 Consumer Credit (June 2026 data). Format: Name:balance:apr:minimum, one entry per debt, entries joined by commas, at most 20 entries. A name may not contain a colon or a comma, since those are the delimiters; percent-encode anything else that needs it, exactly as the URL layer would (a space becomes + or %20, an ampersand becomes %26, and the colon delimiters themselves become %3A). Entries that are not four colon-separated parts are skipped and reported in warnings. The example above is a $6,000 credit card at 22.15% with a $120 minimum and a $14,000 car loan at 7.14% with a $260 minimum, at $400 a month above the minimums.

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: the extra payment starts at $200 a month, an example rather than a statistic. The example debt list uses the Federal Reserve, G.19 Consumer Credit (June 2026 data) average rates; its balances and minimum payments are examples. Replace the whole list with your own and nothing published is assumed on your behalf.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of a payoff order on an example list it can tell you what this month's spare dollar does to your actual balances, your emergency fund, and the date you get out. Text it the question.

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