Solve by a fixed monthly payment to see months and total interest, or work backward from a target payoff date to find the payment you need.
Most card issuers actually compound interest daily against your average daily balance, then post it to your statement once a month. This tool uses a standard monthly-compounding approximation instead — APR ÷ 12 applied once per month to the current balance — which is very close to the real figure and much simpler to reason about for planning purposes.
This is the classic minimum-payment trap: if your payment only barely exceeds the interest charged that month, almost none of it goes toward the actual principal, so the balance shrinks extremely slowly even though you're paying on time every month. The "By Fixed Payment" mode above will flag this directly and tell you to increase your payment if it's too low to ever pay the balance down at all.
Yes — strongly recommended. Every dollar above the interest charged that month goes straight to principal, which compounds in your favor: a smaller balance means less interest the following month too, so increasing your payment shortens the payoff time by more than proportionally. For a full multi-card strategy that decides which balance to attack first, see the Debt Payoff Calculator.
This tool is built for one card at a time. If you're juggling several balances and want to compare snowball (smallest balance first) versus avalanche (highest rate first) strategies across all of them together, the Debt Payoff Calculator is the right tool for that comparison.
Worked example: a $5,000 balance at 22% APR with a $200 fixed monthly payment starts with a first-month interest charge of 5,000 × (0.22 ÷ 12) ≈ $91.67, bringing the balance to roughly $4,891.67 after that first payment. Running that same $200 payment forward month by month takes 34 months (just under 3 years) to clear the balance completely, with $1,749.88 paid in total interest — over a third of the original $5,000 — for a total of $6,749.88 paid out. Bumping the payment up even a little cuts both numbers meaningfully, since more of each payment reaches principal sooner.