Find out exactly how long it takes to clear a credit card — and the brutal price of paying only the minimum. Enter your balance, APR, and monthly payment to see your payoff date, total interest, and how much faster you'd be free with a little extra each month.
Months, interest & payoff date
Credit card companies print a "minimum payment" on every statement for a reason — and it isn't your benefit. At typical rates north of 20%, a minimum payment barely covers the interest, so the balance shrinks at an agonizing crawl. A $6,000 balance paid at a small minimum can take well over a decade to clear and cost more in interest than the original debt. The first thing this calculator does is show you the first-month interest charge, which is the toll you pay just for carrying the balance one more month. Seeing that number in dollars tends to light a fire under people.
The math behind a credit card is unforgiving because interest compounds on what you still owe. Each month you're charged interest on the remaining balance, that interest gets added to the balance, and next month you pay interest on the interest. The only way to win is to pay meaningfully more than the interest accruing, so that real principal disappears every cycle. That's why the size of your monthly payment matters far more than people expect — and why even a modest extra payment has an outsized effect. Try bumping the extra payment field up by $50 or $100 and watch the payoff time and total interest both drop sharply.
If your rate is crushing you, a few moves can change the game: a 0% balance-transfer offer can pause interest for 12–21 months so every dollar attacks principal, a personal loan can swap a 24% card for a single-digit fixed rate, and simply calling to ask for a lower APR works more often than you'd think. Whatever route you choose, the principle is the same — get more of your payment hitting principal. This calculator is the proof of how much that's worth. It assumes a fixed payment each month rather than a declining minimum, which is exactly the disciplined approach that gets cards paid off.
They're designed to keep you in debt for years. Paying only the minimum can triple what you ultimately repay.
You pay interest on your interest. Only payments above the monthly interest actually shrink the balance.
A 0% balance transfer or lower-rate loan sends far more of each payment to principal. Always worth a look.
Clearing a card balance is a race between a fixed payment and compounding interest, and the months-to-payoff formula answers it directly. The relationship is logarithmic, which means returns to a larger payment are steeply non-linear: the first extra dollars above the interest charge do enormous work, while further increases matter progressively less. A balance transfer changes the calculation entirely by suspending interest for a promotional period, so every dollar attacks principal — but only if the balance clears before the promotional rate expires, since the transfer fee and the reversion rate can undo the benefit.
n = −log(1 − (i × B) ÷ PMT) ÷ log(1 + i)Total interest = (PMT × n) − BBalance transfer: cost = balance × transfer fee %, then 0% for the promo termwhere:
Assumptions: Assumes no new spending on the card. Promotional 0% offers usually revert to a high rate on any remaining balance, and a single late payment can void the promotion entirely.
Compare a fixed payment, a larger payment, and a balance transfer.
ResultTransfer costs $272 versus $1,720 of interest — a $1,448 saving
The transfer only wins if the balance is actually cleared inside the promotional window. Pay $250 a month against the transferred balance and $2,572 remains when the promotion ends, reverting to a high rate — which erases most of the advantage. Divide the transferred amount by the promotional months and treat that as the required payment.