Credit Card Payoff Calculator
Enter your values below and click Calculate for instant results.
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Find out how long it will take to pay off your credit card and how much interest you will pay. Enter balance, APR, and monthly payment for an instant result.
Enter your values below and click Calculate for instant results.
A credit card payoff calculator tells you exactly how long it will take to pay off a single credit card balance and how much total interest you will pay along the way. Credit card APRs are typically much higher than other forms of debt, making the total interest cost surprising — and motivating — to see clearly.
💡 The average credit card APR in the US in 2026 is around 20–22%. On a $5,000 balance at 21.99% APR, making only the minimum payment (often set around 2–3% of the balance) could take over 15 years to pay off and cost more in interest than the original balance.
Credit card minimum payments are deliberately set low — often just 2% of the balance or $25, whichever is greater. This maximizes the interest the lender earns while keeping the payment small enough that cardholders keep using the card. On a $5,000 balance at 22% APR with a 2% minimum payment, you would make over 200 payments and pay more in interest than the original balance before the debt is cleared.
Small increases in monthly payment have a disproportionately large effect on payoff time. Paying $50 more per month on a credit card balance cuts months off the timeline in a way that feels almost too good to be true — but the math checks out because every extra dollar reduces the balance on which compounding interest is calculated. Use this calculator to test what paying $50, $100, or $200 extra per month does to your payoff date.
This calculator handles one card at a time. If you have multiple credit card balances, our Debt Payoff Calculator lets you enter all of them and compare the avalanche method (highest interest first) against the snowball method (lowest balance first) to find the most efficient path to being debt-free across all accounts.