Payday Loan Calculator

How to use this payday loan calculator

What this calculator does

This calculator turns a short-term lender quote into four cost measures: APR, APR amount, Monthly fee, and Total debt. It is designed for a single-payment payday-style loan in which a stated finance charge applies to the principal and an optional recurring fee is charged for each started 30-day period. The calculation helps you compare the scale of a short-term fee with an annual rate and see the cash amount expected at repayment. It is an estimate based only on the terms entered here; it does not determine whether a loan is legal in your location, affordable for your budget, or appropriate for you.

Use it when comparing two short-term loan offers, checking a lender's fee disclosure, estimating how much must be available on the due date, or seeing how a longer term can change an annualized APR and recurring fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's explanation of payday-loan APR is useful context because APR is intended to make borrowing costs easier to compare across products.

How to calculate

1. The calculator opens with a complete demonstration: a $100 loan, $15 finance charge, 14-day term, and 5% monthly fee. The results and a validated Excel workbook are available immediately.
2. Replace Loan amount with the principal you would actually receive. Enter U.S.-style numbers using a decimal point; valid comma grouping such as 1,000.00 is accepted.
3. Enter the lender's one-time Finance charge and the contractual Loan term in whole days. The APR updates live as either value changes.
4. Enter the Monthly fee percent only if the offer adds a recurring percentage fee. The model applies that percentage to the original principal for every started 30-day period, matching the calculator's stated monthly-fee assumption.
5. Read Total debt first for the estimated due-date cash amount, then use APR to compare the annualized borrowing cost. APR amount is an annualized dollar equivalent, not an additional amount automatically due on the short-term maturity date.
6. Select Download Excel to export the current validated inputs and results as a real .xlsx workbook. Select Reset to clear the demonstration and all calculated state; after Reset, Download Excel is disabled until a complete valid set of inputs is entered again.

Input guide

Loan amount is the required principal, in U.S. dollars, before finance charges. Enter a positive amount from $0.01 through $1,000,000,000; for example, $300. A larger principal raises dollar fees whenever those fees are percentage-based, but a proportionally identical finance charge can leave APR unchanged. Do not enter the repayment total here, because that would count charges twice.

Finance charge is the required one-time dollar fee for the stated term. Zero is allowed, and $45 is a common-style example for a $300 loan when the fee is $15 per $100. Increasing this input raises APR, APR amount, and Total debt. Enter the contractual finance charge rather than a late fee, rollover fee, or returned-payment fee unless the loan quote explicitly treats it as part of the original finance charge.

Loan term is the required number of whole calendar days from funding to the contractual due date, from 1 through 365; 14 days is the demonstration value. A longer term lowers the annualized APR when the finance charge is unchanged because the same charge is spread across more time. This model also counts each started 30-day period for monthly fees, so moving from day 30 to day 31 can add another monthly-fee cycle.

Monthly fee percent is the required percentage applied to the original Loan amount for each started 30-day period. Enter 0 if the offer has no such fee; 5% is the demonstration value. A higher percentage increases Monthly fee and Total debt but does not change the APR shown here, because this calculator reproduces the reference model in which APR is computed from the separate Finance charge. Do not enter 0.05 for 5%; enter 5 or 5%.

Output guide

APR is the finance charge annualized as a percentage: finance charge ÷ loan amount × 365 ÷ loan term × 100. A zero finance charge produces 0% APR; a high APR indicates that a short-term charge becomes very large when expressed over a year. APR amount converts that annualized percentage back to dollars by multiplying the Loan amount by APR ÷ 100. It is useful as a scale comparison, but it is not added to Total debt because the original short-term Finance charge is the actual charge entered for the term.

Monthly fee is the recurring-fee total for the current term: Loan amount × Monthly fee percent ÷ 100 × the number of started 30-day periods. It is $0 when the percentage is zero. Total debt is the estimated amount due under this model: Loan amount + Finance charge + Monthly fee. The repayment-composition chart uses those same three dollar components and omits the chart if fewer than two components are positive.

Worked example

With the opening values, the finance charge ratio is $15 ÷ $100 = 0.15. Annualizing it over 14 days gives 0.15 × 365 ÷ 14 × 100 = 391.07% APR. The APR amount is $100 × 391.0714% = $391.07. Fourteen days falls within one started 30-day period, so the monthly fee is $100 × 5% × 1 = $5.00. The amount due is therefore $100 principal + $15 finance charge + $5 monthly fee = $120.00 Total debt. The CFPB notes that a $15 fee per $100 on a two-week payday loan corresponds to an APR of almost 400%, which is consistent with this demonstration.