When do my student loans end, and what do they cost?

A fixed repayment plan is defined rather than chosen: 34 CFR 685.208 sets the period, and the borrower repays in full over it with level monthly payments. Which period depends on when you borrowed. A borrower holding any Direct Loan made on or after July 1, 2026 is on the Tiered Standard plan added by 91 FR 23886, whose period runs from the total balance, and $38,000 lands at 15 years. A borrower with nothing newer than that stays on the ten-year standard plan. The term above is yours to set, and it starts at 10. Each federal loan carries a rate fixed for its life, so the bill is each loan's own level payment over that term, added together. On the example list that is $215.93 for the undergrad unsubsidized at 6.52%, $146.04 for the grad unsubsidized at 8.07%, and $88.94 for the Grad PLUS at 9.07%: $450.91 a month against $38,000 of balance.

Left exactly as written, that plan ends Aug 2036, and every loan on it ends the same month, because every loan is amortized over the same 10 years. It costs $16,109 of interest, so $38,000 borrowed becomes $54,109 repaid. The first bill shows why: of that $450.91, $236.84 is the interest the balances accrued that month and only $214.07 is principal. Interest is 52.5% of the first payment and falls from there as the balance does.

Anything above the bill is where the arithmetic changes. Federal loans carry no prepayment penalty, and 34 CFR 685.211 applies a payment to accrued charges first, then outstanding interest, then principal. This calculator sends every extra dollar at the highest rate first and rolls a cleared loan's payment onto the next one, which is the order that costs the least. At $200 a month extra the Grad PLUS at 9.07% goes first, in month 27 (Nov 2028), its $88.94 joins the pile, and the last loan closes Sep 2032: 73 months in total rather than 120, and $8,875 of interest rather than $16,109.

The extra payment is the only lever on this page that shortens the loan, so it is worth seeing priced rather than described. Same $38,000, same rates, same 10-year plan; the only thing changing down the table is what goes on top of the $450.91 bill.

The first hundred dollars is the one that earns the most. Going from nothing to $100 a month takes 30 months off the plan and $4,781 off the interest. Going from $500 to $1,000, which is five times as much money, takes off only 17 months more and $2,088 more. There is less balance left for each dollar to work against, and interest you never pay is the only thing an extra payment can buy.

Which is also the honest frame for the money itself. An extra dollar here earns a guaranteed 9.07%, the rate on the loan it lands on, tax free and with no market risk, until that loan clears and the rate drops to the next one. Whether it belongs here rather than in a retirement account is a comparison against that number, not against a feeling, and it has its own page: the debt or invest calculator. If you are carrying other balances at the same time, the order across all of them is the debt payoff calculator, which prices the same rolling budget across a mixed list of cards and loans with lender-set minimums.

Most payoff calculators take a single balance and a single rate. A student borrower almost never has that. The natural fix is a balance-weighted average, which on this list is 7.4792%, and on the plan as written that fix is nearly harmless: one loan of $38,000 at 7.4792% bills $450.65 a month against the real $450.91, and the ten-year interest differs by $31.

Add the extra payment and the blend breaks. The list says $8,875 of interest; the single blended loan says $9,392, which overstates the cost by $518. The reason is structural rather than arithmetic: a blended loan has no most expensive loan to aim at. The whole value of paying extra is that it lands on the 9.07% loan and not on the 6.52% one, and an average erases exactly that. So the loans here are a list, up to 20 of them, and the list travels in the URL.

Consolidation is not free blending either. 34 CFR 685.202(a)(10) sets a Direct Consolidation Loan's rate at the weighted average rounded up to the nearest higher eighth of a percent, so 7.4792% becomes 7.5%. For a borrower with no Direct Loan made on or after July 1, 2026, 685.208(b)(2) then hands a $38,000 consolidation a repayment period of up to 20 years. That combination bills $306.13 a month, which is $145 less than the standard plan, and costs $35,470 of interest against $16,109. Consolidation lowers the payment. It does not lower the cost, and here it more than doubles it.

The same balance on a longer schedule is the trade the consolidation ladder offers, and it is worth seeing in full. Every row below is the same $38,000 at the same rates with no extra payment, changing only the years.

Doubling the term from 10 to 20 years cuts the bill by $145 a month and multiplies the interest by 2.2, from $16,109 to $35,458. At 30 years the bill is $266 and the interest is $57,637, which is more than the $38,000 borrowed. Note also that the longer rows are not simply available: the period is set by the balance and by when the loans were made, not by preference. On the Tiered Standard plan that governs any borrower holding a Direct Loan made on or after July 1, 2026, $38,000 is billed over 15 years. A borrower with nothing newer stays at ten unless the loans are consolidated, and consolidating this balance stretches to at most 20. The calculator warns you when the term you typed is longer than either.

The floor at the other end is real too. 34 CFR 685.208 puts the payment at $50 a month or more under both regimes: paragraph (b) lets only the final payment be less, and paragraph (c) lets it drop below $50 only when the balance itself is under $50. A $3,000 balance at 6.52% would amortize to about $34 a month over 10 years, so the floor raises it to $50 and the loan is gone in 73 months for $640 of interest. Small balances finish early whether or not you meant them to.

This page prices one plan: fixed rates, a level bill, every extra dollar straight at principal. If your loans are federal, that is one option among several, and for some borrowers it is the wrong question rather than a slightly wrong answer.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness is the case that inverts everything above. Under 34 CFR 685.219, 120 qualifying monthly payments made while working full time for a qualifying employer cancels the principal and accrued interest that remain, and the ten-year standard plan is a qualifying repayment plan. Look at what that means for the numbers on this page: the standard plan here is exactly 120 payments, so a borrower who finishes it has nothing left to forgive, and the $200 extra retires the loans in 73 months, which is 47 months before the 120th payment would even arrive. Every dollar of the $7,234 this page calls a saving is a dollar a public-service borrower may have been about to have cancelled. If that is you, start at the PSLF calculator, not here.

Income-driven repayment is the other absence. A federal plan can set the payment from your income and household size rather than from the balance, which changes the bill, the payoff date, the total interest, and whether there is a balance left at the end to be forgiven at all. None of that is modelled here, and the difference is not small: this page cannot see your income, so it cannot tell you that the $450.91 bill above is more than a plan you qualify for would ask. Price it at the income-driven repayment calculator, and treat this page as the answer to what happens if you simply pay the standard bill and more.

Three smaller gaps, each of which moves the number. Capitalized interest: unpaid interest from a period of forbearance or deferment is added to principal and then earns interest itself, so enter the balance your servicer shows today rather than what you originally borrowed. Refinancing to a private lender: it can lower the rate, and it permanently gives up income-driven repayment, forgiveness and federal deferment, so it is a rate question with a one-way door attached, and this page models the federal-style fixed schedule only. And the calendar: repayment here counts from Aug 22, 2026, with month 1 landing one month later, so a borrower already two years in should read the months rather than the dates. Nothing here is repayment counseling.

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/student-loan-payoff.json?extra=250&loans=Undergrad+unsubsidized%3A19000%3A6.52%2CGrad+PLUS%3A7000%3A9.07

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with scheduledPayment, the bill the plan asks for, with minimumApplied flagging the $50 regulatory floor and loans echoing each loan's own payment and first-month interest; standard and accelerated, each carrying months, payoffDate, totalInterest, totalPaid, monthlyOutlay and an order array giving the month, date and interest for each loan as it retires; monthsSaved and interestSaved for the difference between them; totalBalance, weightedRate, consolidationRate, tieredMaxYears for the 685.208(c) Tiered Standard period, consolidationTermYears for the 685.208(b)(2) ladder and maxTermYears for the longer of the two; yearly, the year-by-year paid, interest, principal and balance; plus drivers, sensitivity across five extra payments and five terms, and notModeled, the federal options this page deliberately leaves out, drivers ranked by effect with a plain sentence each, assumptions that say for every field whether you supplied it and name the source when the default came from one, sources with a URL and an as-of date for each source the tool cites, which is an empty list on the calculators whose every default is an example input rather than a published figure, 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.
• term (years), default 10 years, from 34 CFR 685.208, Direct Loan Program fixed payment repayment plans.
• loans (a list), default the example list of 3 loans totalling $38,000, one at each rate Federal Student Aid published for Direct Loans first disbursed in 2026-27. Format: Name:balance:rate, one entry per loan, entries joined by commas, at most 20 entries. The rate is the annual percentage on the note, so 6.52 and not 0.0652. 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 three colon-separated parts are skipped and reported in warnings. The example above is a $19,000 undergrad unsubsidized loan at 6.52% and a $7,000 grad plus loan at 9.07%, at $250 a month above the bill.

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 Student Aid, interest rates for Direct Loans first disbursed July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027, as of 2026-06-04. Direct Subsidized and Direct Unsubsidized Loans for undergraduate students 6.52%; Direct Unsubsidized Loans for graduate and professional students 8.07%; Direct PLUS Loans 9.07%. Each rate is fixed for the life of the loan.
• 34 CFR 685.208, Direct Loan Program fixed payment repayment plans, as of 2026-08-22. The section splits on July 1, 2026. Paragraph (b) governs borrowers who have not received a Direct Loan on or after that date: the standard plan repays in full within ten years, payments are at least $50 a month except that the final payment may be less, and a Direct Consolidation Loan that entered repayment on or after July 1, 2006 gets a longer period set by balance, 12 years at $7,500, 15 at $10,000, 20 at $20,000, 25 at $40,000, and 30 at $60,000 and above. Paragraphs (b)(8) and (c)(1), both added by 91 FR 23886 (May 1, 2026), put every borrower holding a Direct Loan made on or after July 1, 2026 on the Tiered Standard plan, on one ladder set by the total Direct Loan balance at the time the borrower enters repayment: 10 years under $25,000, 15 years at $25,000, 20 years at $50,000, and 25 years at $100,000 and above, with the same $50 minimum except that a balance under $50 bills the outstanding amount due.
• 34 CFR 685.211, Direct Loan Program miscellaneous repayment provisions, as of 2026-08-22. A payment is applied first to accrued charges and collection costs, then to outstanding interest, then to outstanding principal. A borrower may prepay all or part of a loan at any time without penalty, and a prepayment at or above the monthly amount advances the due date of the next payment unless the borrower requests otherwise.
• 34 CFR 685.219, Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, as of 2026-08-22. After 120 qualifying monthly payments made after October 1, 2007 while employed full time by a qualifying employer, the Secretary forgives the principal and accrued interest remaining on the loans. The qualifying repayment plans include the ten-year standard repayment plan.
• 34 CFR 685.202(a)(10), interest rate on a Direct Consolidation Loan, as of 2026-08-22. For consolidation applications received on or after July 1, 2013, the interest rate is the weighted average of the interest rates on the loans being consolidated, rounded to the nearest higher one-eighth of one percent, with no cap.

Default values on this page: the extra payment starts at $200 a month and the term at 10 years, the shortest period 34 CFR 685.208 sets and the one that matches the 120 payments Public Service Loan Forgiveness counts. Your own billed period depends on the balance and on when the loans were made, and the calculator shows it. The example loan list carries one loan at each of the three rates Federal Student Aid published for Direct Loans first disbursed between July 1, 2026 and June 30, 2027, namely 6.52% for undergraduate Direct Subsidized and Unsubsidized loans, 8.07% for graduate Direct Unsubsidized loans and 9.07% for Direct PLUS loans. Those rates are published; the three balances are examples, not statistics, and they are arranged so the largest balance is not the most expensive loan, which is the case where paying by rate actually matters. Replace the whole list with your own and nothing is assumed on your behalf except the term.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of an extra payment you type in, it can see what is actually reaching the loan each month, tell you what that pace really ends in, and say what has to give in a month where the extra does not happen. Text it the question.

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