Repayment Calculator

The summary tells you what. The schedule tells you where

Ask a bank what your loan will cost and you get one number. The EMI. It is the number everyone remembers, and it is also the number that hides the most.

Because that single figure never changes across the whole tenure, but what it is made of changes every single month. Early on it is nearly all interest. By the end it is nearly all principal. Same payment, completely different job.

This calculator prints the summary and then the whole schedule underneath it, one row per payment, so you can see that shift happening. You also get a payoff date, which is a surprisingly useful thing to have in your head.

The amounts here are in rupees, and the Reserve Bank of India now requires lenders to hand you an amortisation schedule as part of the Key Facts Statement on any retail loan, so you should be able to hold this side by side with the real thing.

Filling it in

1. Loan Amount. The sanctioned principal. Not what lands in your account after the processing fee comes out, the full figure the interest is charged on.
2. Loan Term. In whole years. A 42 month loan will not fit here, so use our personal loan EMI calculator if your tenure is in odd months.
3. Annual Interest Rate. The rate on the sanction letter, per year, on a reducing balance basis. That is what Indian lenders quote for term loans.
4. Payment Frequency. Monthly for almost everything. Annual is there for the loans that genuinely settle once a year.
5. Loan Start Date. The month and year your first instalment is due. This only drives the payoff date, so a rough guess is fine if you do not have the sanction letter yet.
6. Generate Amortization Schedule. Leave it on Yes. It is the point of this particular tool.

One formula, then a hundred and twenty small subtractions

Two things happen when you press Calculate, and they are worth separating.

First, the instalment

EMI = (P × r) / [ 1 - (1 + r)^-n ]

You may have seen this written with the powers on top instead of a negative exponent underneath. Both forms give the same answer, they are the same equation with the fraction flipped.

Then, the walk

Having found the instalment, the calculator does not guess at the rest. It walks the loan one period at a time, and each step is only three lines of arithmetic:

1. Interest for this period is the balance you are currently carrying, times r
2. Principal for this period is the instalment minus that interest
3. The new balance is the old balance minus that principal

Repeat until the balance hits zero. That is the entire schedule, and it is why the totals at the top are trustworthy. They are added up from the rows rather than estimated by multiplying the instalment by the number of months.

Twelve lakh over ten years, row by row

Lets take a real one. ₹12,00,000 at 9.5 percent over 10 years, monthly, starting April 2026.

The monthly rate is 9.5 divided by 100 divided by 12, which is 0.00791667. There are 120 payments.

So you borrow twelve lakh and hand back a little over eighteen and a half. The interest alone is more than half of what you borrowed.

Now here is what the schedule does with that same 15,527.71 at three points in the loan.

Your very first payment is 61 percent interest. Your very last one is 99 percent principal. Nothing about the payment changed. Only the balance it was calculated against.

Why the first few years feel like nothing is happening

This is the thing the schedule exists to show you, and it catches almost everyone out.

On the loan above, the month where principal finally overtakes interest is payment 34 of 120. So for the first two and a half years, more than half of everything you pay is rent on the money rather than repayment of it.

Push it further. Look at where you stand exactly halfway through, after 60 of the 120 payments:

Read that middle row again. You are half way through the payments and you have already paid seven tenths of the interest, while still owing more than three fifths of the principal.

None of this is a trick. It falls straight out of charging interest on a balance that starts large. But it has two practical consequences worth carrying around.

Prepay early or do not bother. A lump sum in year two removes interest that has not been charged yet across the remaining eight years. The same lump sum in year eight removes almost nothing, because you have already paid for the expensive part.

Refinancing late resets the clock. Moving to a lower rate in year seven puts you back at the front of a fresh schedule, where interest is front loaded all over again. It can still be worth it, but the headline rate on its own will not tell you whether it is.

Reading a row of the schedule

Six columns, and each one answers a specific question.

Two uses for that beyond curiosity. The Remaining Balance column is your foreclosure figure, so if you are thinking of settling the loan in month 40, read across to month 40 and that is roughly the cheque, before whatever foreclosure charge your lender applies. And the Interest column added up to any point is what you would claim if the loan carries a tax deduction, which some do and most personal loans do not.

Switching to annual repayments

The Payment Frequency dropdown has an annual option, and it changes more than the label.

On annual, the rate is divided by 1 instead of 12, so the full annual rate applies to each period. The number of periods becomes the number of years. On a ten year loan you get ten rows instead of a hundred and twenty, one per year.

The interesting consequence is that annual repayment costs more in total, not less, even though the rate is the same number. Interest is charged on whatever balance you are carrying, and paying once a year means you carry a higher balance for longer. Monthly instalments chip away at the principal twelve times as often, so there is less balance sitting there earning interest against you.

Most retail lending in India is monthly, so unless your loan genuinely settles once a year, leave it alone.

What sits outside the schedule

The schedule is a complete and accurate picture of principal and interest at the rate you entered. Around it sit a few things that live in your loan agreement rather than in this arithmetic.

The processing fee. Charged once, usually deducted from the disbursement, so you receive less than the principal while paying interest on all of it. In India it also attracts GST at 18 percent on the fee itself. To see what that does to the real cost, our personal loan EMI calculator works out the effective APR with the fee included.

Rate resets. Everything here holds the rate steady for the full tenure. On a floating rate loan the schedule is redrawn each time the rate moves, and lenders usually adjust the tenure rather than the instalment.

Prepayments. Any lump sum you throw at the principal rewrites every row after it. The schedule shown is the no prepayment path, which is the right baseline to measure a prepayment against.

Late payment and foreclosure charges. Both are in your agreement, neither is in the arithmetic.

One more time

One formula gives the instalment. Then the calculator walks the loan period by period, taking interest off the balance you are carrying, putting the rest against the principal, and doing it again with a slightly smaller balance.

The instalment never moves. The split inside it moves every month, and it moves slowly at first. On a ten year loan at 9.5 percent, principal only overtakes interest at payment 34, and at the halfway mark you have paid 71 percent of the interest while still owing 61.6 percent of the money.

Which is why prepaying early is worth several times what prepaying late is worth, and why the total interest figure is the number to compare between offers rather than the instalment.

Hold this schedule next to the one your lender gives you in the Key Facts Statement. If the two disagree by more than rounding, ask them why, and do tell us as well, because we would want to know.

Questions people ask

Why is my EMI the same every month if the interest keeps changing?

Because the instalment is worked out once, at the start, as the level amount that will exactly clear the loan over the full tenure. The interest inside it falls each month and the principal rises to fill the gap, so the total stays flat.

The schedule does not exactly match my bank's. Why?

Usually rounding, since lenders round the instalment to whole rupees and adjust the final payment. Sometimes it is the day count, because some lenders charge interest on actual days elapsed rather than treating every month as a twelfth of a year. Small gaps are normal. Large ones are worth a phone call.

How much does prepaying actually save?

Look at the Remaining Balance column for the month you would prepay, then at the Interest column for every month after it. That interest is what disappears. It is much larger early in the loan than late.

My tenure is 42 months. Can I use this?

Not directly, the term field takes whole years. Round to the nearest year for a rough figure, or use the EMI calculator, which takes tenure in months.

Is the total interest really more than half the loan?

On a ten year loan at 9.5 percent, yes. Interest of ₹6,63,324 on a principal of ₹12,00,000 is 55 percent. Longer tenures and higher rates push that share up quickly, which is the real cost of stretching a loan out.

Can I use this for a loan in another currency?

The maths is currency blind, so the numbers will be correct. The labels will say rupees. Read them as whatever you actually entered.

References

A note on the sources here. The requirement that Indian lenders provide an amortisation schedule and an all-inclusive annual percentage rate to every retail borrower comes from a Reserve Bank of India circular, not from industry practice, and that circular is the document to hold your lender to. The description of how each instalment divides between principal and finance charge follows the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's plain language definition, which describes the same mechanism this calculator implements.

1. Reserve Bank of India, Key Facts Statement (KFS) for Loans and Advances, circular RBI/2024-25/18 dated 15 April 2024, which requires a KFS including an APR computation sheet and an amortisation schedule for all retail and MSME term loans. https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/notification/PDFs/CIRCULARKFS1504242AE2500BAF494C2A82442B0B642705C1.PDF
2. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Auto loan answers: key terms, on amortisation and how each payment splits between principal and finance charge. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/auto-loans/answers/key-terms/
3. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mortgages key terms, on loans that do not fully amortise and what happens when a payment falls short of the interest due. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/language/cfpb-in-english/mortgages-key-terms/
4. Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute, Compound interest, Wex legal dictionary. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/compound_interest