The Personal Loan Calculator
Move three personal loan sliders — amount from $500 to $5,000, term from 3 to 36 months, APR from 6% to 36% — and the calculator returns the estimated monthly payment, total repayment, and total interest instantly.
Estimated monthly payment
$131.46
Total repayment: — · Total interest: —
All results are estimates for planning only. Your actual APR, payment, and fees are set by the lender and stated in your agreement before you sign.
The arithmetic is the standard amortization formula every personal loan lender uses, run in your browser with nothing submitted anywhere. Set the APR from your band in the rates guide, or test the pessimistic end first — an offer that works at 32% is bulletproof at 24%.
What the Calculator Is Doing
The personal loan payment formula amortizes the principal across equal installments: each payment covers that month's interest on the remaining balance plus a scheduled slice of principal, which is why early payments are interest-heavy and late ones principal-heavy.
Formally: payment = P × r ÷ (1 − (1+r)−n), where P is principal, r the monthly rate (APR ÷ 12), and n the number of payments. The shape matters practically — extra principal paid early kills more interest than the same dollars paid late, because interest accrues on what remains.
That front-loading is also why 'I'll refinance later' costs more than it feels: the expensive months are the first ones. Choosing the right term up front, with this tool, beats repairing the choice downstream.
Reference Payments at Common Settings
The Fidelity Funding table below pre-computes the settings personal loan borrowers test most — four amounts across three terms at a representative 24% APR — every cell an estimate the sliders can refine.
| Amount | 6 months | 12 months | 24 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $88.49 | $47.28 | $26.45 |
| $1,000 | $176.98 | $94.56 | $52.90 |
| $2,500 | $442.46 | $236.40 | $132.24 |
| $5,000 | $884.91 | $472.80 | $264.48 |
Two patterns worth internalizing from the grid: doubling the term does not halve the payment (interest fills the gap), and the smallest loans change least across terms — which is why short terms dominate smart borrowing at the $500 end, as the $500 guide argues.
Turning a Payment into a Decision
A personal loan calculator result becomes a decision through the slack test: list income minus fixed costs, and a sustainable payment consumes no more than half of what remains.
The test is deliberately conservative because loans run twelve to twenty-four months and budgets have bad months. A $160 payment against $400 of slack survives the car trouble and the short paycheck; a $300 payment against the same slack is a late fee waiting for its month.
Personal loan lenders run the same judgment as debt-to-income, covered on the eligibility page — which means the slack test also predicts your offers. Borrowers who arrive with a payment ceiling already computed read offer screens in seconds.
Three Slider Sessions Worth Running
Three five-minute Fidelity Funding sessions answer most personal loan borrowing questions: the term-tradeoff session, the rate-sensitivity session, and the amount-honesty session.
- Term trade-off: fix amount and APR, slide the term, and watch total interest — the comfort-versus-cost curve made visible.
- Rate sensitivity: fix amount and term, slide APR across your plausible band — this is what comparing two offers is worth in dollars.
- Amount honesty: price the padded request against the exact invoice — the difference is what 'just in case' costs.
Each session ends with a number you can hold against real Fidelity Funding offers. The card comparison adds the revolving-credit column for borrowers still choosing instruments.
What This Tool Can't Tell You
The calculator cannot know your personal loan APR, your fees, or your approval — those come only from lenders reviewing your actual file, which is what the soft-pull request exists to produce.
Fidelity Funding's advice: treat every output as scaffolding: close enough to budget with, never close enough to sign on. Origination fees, where charged, change effective cost in ways the APR already captures — one more reason the APR line on a real offer outranks any estimate, this page's included.
When scaffolding has done its job, the five-minute request replaces estimates with written terms, and the comparison becomes real. That hand-off — tool to offer — is the whole workflow this site is built around.
The Full Term Grid at Two Rate Bands
Side-by-side grids at a good-credit 15% APR and a rebuilding-credit 30% APR show how the same personal loan diverges by band — the dollars behind every credit-improvement section on this site.
| Amount · 12 mo | Payment @15% (est.) | Payment @30% (est.) | Interest gap (est.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | $90.26 | $97.49 | $87 |
| $2,000 | $180.52 | $194.98 | $174 |
| $3,000 | $270.77 | $292.46 | $260 |
| $5,000 | $451.29 | $487.44 | $434 |
The right column is the price of a weaker file on a one-year personal loan — real, bounded, and temporary for borrowers running the rebuild cycle. The bad credit guide turns this grid into strategy; the sliders above turn it into your own numbers.
The Extra-Payment Calculator Session
Model early payoff by shortening the term slider: a personal loan you plan to overpay by 25% behaves like the next-shorter term, and the interest column shows exactly what the habit is worth.
Worked version: a $2,500 personal loan at 24% over 24 months runs about $132.24 monthly with roughly $674 total interest (estimates). Pay $165 instead — the 18-month payment — and the loan behaves like the 18-month schedule: roughly $509 of interest, about $165 saved, five months returned to your life.
Most lenders apply extras to principal automatically with no prepayment penalty; the glossary entry covers the one line to confirm. The session takes two minutes and permanently changes how the payment slider reads.
The Consolidation Session
Consolidators use the calculator twice: once to price the replacement personal loan, once to price the status quo — and the gap between the two runs is the decision.
Run one: enter the payoff total of the balances, your band's APR from the rates guide, and the term you would actually honor. Run two: approximate the current blend — the combined minimums and the years they imply. When run one's total repayment undercuts run two's trajectory, debt consolidation loans have made their case in your own numbers.
The method's long form, with the ninety-day execution protocol, lives in the consolidation guide; this tool is its arithmetic engine.
Choosing an APR When You Don't Know Yours
Until a soft-pull request returns real offers, set the APR slider from your credit band — roughly 8%–15% excellent, 12%–22% good, 20%–36% fair and rebuilding (estimates) — and test the pessimistic end first.
Planning at the band's top is the conservative habit that makes every surprise a pleasant one: a personal loan payment that fits at 32% is comfortable at 24%. Band mechanics, and the 90-day moves that shift yours, fill the rates guide and the eligibility page.
And when guessing stops being necessary — the five-minute request replaces the slider's assumption with written APRs — this page remains the audit tool that prices each real offer against the others.
Making the Calculator a Standing Habit
Borrowers who bookmark this page use it beyond the loan decision: pricing a store's financing offer, auditing a friend's agreement, or sanity-checking any fixed payment the world proposes.
The amortization math is universal — retail financing, medical payment plans, and furniture 'easy payments' all reduce to the same three sliders, and most look different once they do. A personal loan calculator is really a fixed-payment truth machine, and truth machines earn bookmarks.
Fidelity Funding keeps the tool free, quiet, and submission-free for exactly that reason: the habit of running numbers before signing anything is the habit this entire site exists to install.
The Calculator Inside the Fidelity Funding Workflow
Within the Fidelity Funding workflow the calculator holds the before-and-after positions: before the request it sets the payment ceiling, and after offers arrive it prices each one against the others.
Before: the slack test plus the sliders produce the one number worth memorizing — the personal loan payment your budget can carry in a bad month. After: each offer's amount, term, and APR re-entered here yields comparable totals, which is how two offers with different shapes get judged on one axis.
The workflow's other tools slot around it: the rates guide supplies the APR assumption, the eligibility page the approval math, and the lender table the market frame. The calculator is where they all become dollars.
Small Personal Loans Behave Differently — Model Accordingly
Small personal loans compress the calculator's trade-offs: at $500–$1,000 the term slider changes total interest by tens of dollars, which argues for the shortest comfortable term almost automatically.
The grid shows it plainly: a $500 personal loan's interest spread between 6 and 18 months is roughly $50 (estimate) — real money, but not decision-bending money. At $4,000 the same slider move spreads hundreds. The modeling lesson: sweat the term on large personal loans, sweat the amount on small ones, and sweat the APR on both.
Fast personal loans marketing never mentions any of this, and neither do pitches for debt consolidation loans — which is precisely why the calculator does. The $500 and $4,000 guides carry the tier-specific strategy the sliders here make visible.
The Calculator as an Honesty Device
The tool's deepest use is self-honesty: entering the real invoice instead of the round number, the real APR band instead of the advertised floor, and the real budget instead of the optimistic one.
Every personal loan regret traces to a number someone declined to look at — the padded amount, the stretch term, the payment that only fit in good months. The sliders make looking effortless, which removes the last excuse. Thirty honest seconds here outperform any amount of offer-screen optimism.
Fidelity Funding's interest in your honesty is aligned, not altruistic: personal loans sized truthfully get repaid, and repaid loans are the network's entire economics. Use the tool against us if you like — a borrower who computes that no loan fits has used it exactly correctly.
Thirty Seconds, Before Anything Gets Signed
Whatever else this page taught, keep the thirty-second ritual: before signing any fixed-payment agreement anywhere, enter its amount, term, and APR here and read the total-interest line out loud.
The ritual catches everything the offer screen's typography was designed to soften — the stretch term dressed as affordability, the fee hidden inside a friendly payment, the padding that round numbers smuggle in. Thirty seconds, three sliders, one honest total: the cheapest underwriting a personal loan borrower will ever perform on their own behalf.
Fidelity Funding built the tool, but the ritual belongs to you, portable to every financing decision this site will never see. Take it; that is what it is for.
Edge Cases the Sliders Handle
Three edge cases borrowers ask about resolve cleanly in the tool: odd amounts price linearly between the gridlines, three-month sprints work at every size, and the 36-month ceiling exists to discourage itself.
Odd amounts first: a $1,750 personal loan prices exactly between the $1,500 and $2,000 settings, so interpolate or just set the slider — it moves in $100 steps for the purpose. Short sprints second: the three-month term computes fine and suits bridge cases where income is already scheduled. The ceiling last: 36 months on a small personal loan is almost always a budget signal, not a strategy, and the interest line says so louder than any warning text could.
Each edge case is really the same lesson — the tool is honest at the margins because the amortization math is. Trust the output over the instinct, at every setting, and let the total-interest line cast the deciding vote whenever a personal loan offer and your optimism disagree. The sliders have no stake in the outcome, which is exactly what makes their verdict worth taking. One closing note on precision: results round to the cent for readability, while lenders compute daily interest on actual calendars, so a real agreement's figures may differ from the estimate by a few dollars across the full schedule — a rounding gap, never a surprise, and one more reason the signed document is always the final authority.