EMI / Lånekalkulator

Calculate your loan EMI or monthly payment instantly

This free EMI calculator turns any loan into a clear monthly figure. Enter the loan amount, annual interest rate and term, and it instantly shows your EMI — the equated monthly installment, or what most US borrowers simply call the monthly loan payment — alongside the total interest and the total amount you will repay.

Drag the sliders or type exact numbers and every result, chart and schedule updates live, with no sign-up and nothing to install. It works just as well as a loan calculator, a monthly payment calculator or a loan repayment calculator.

How EMI is calculated

EMI is worked out with one standard formula: EMI = P · r · (1 + r)ⁿ ÷ ((1 + r)ⁿ − 1), where P is the principal, r is the monthly interest rate (annual rate ÷ 12 ÷ 100) and n is the number of monthly payments. A $30,000 car loan at 6% over 5 years (60 months) works out to about $580 a month and roughly $4,800 in total interest.

You never have to touch the maths — the calculator applies the formula the moment you change an input, so you can experiment with different amounts, rates and terms in seconds.

Car, home, personal and mortgage loans

The same amortization math powers every kind of loan, so this works as a car loan EMI calculator, a home loan / mortgage EMI calculator and a personal loan calculator in one. One-tap presets seed typical US amounts, rates and terms for auto, mortgage and personal loans, and from there you can fine-tune everything.

Switch the term between years and months to see how a longer term lowers the monthly payment but quietly raises the total interest you pay — a trade-off the chart and totals make impossible to miss.

See exactly where your money goes

A principal-vs-interest donut chart shows what share of your repayment is interest at a glance — invaluable when you are comparing offers. Below it, a full amortization schedule breaks down every payment: opening balance, how much goes to principal, how much to interest, and the remaining balance.

View it month by month or as a tidy yearly summary, and export the whole table to CSV for your own spreadsheet or records.

Save money with prepayments

The prepayment planner is where this tool outpaces ad-heavy competitors like Bankrate and calculator.net. Add an extra amount to each monthly payment, or a one-time lump sum, and it instantly shows how much interest you will save and how many months or years you will knock off the loan.

On a $250,000 mortgage at 7%, an extra $200 a month can save well over $100,000 in interest and clear the loan around eight years early — proof that even small extra payments compound into real savings.

Compare two loans side by side

Not sure whether a shorter term or a lower rate is the better deal? Compare mode puts two loans next to each other and tells you which costs less overall and by how much — so you can weigh the rate-versus-term trade-off with real numbers instead of guesswork.

Bankrate's loan comparison tool works similarly but loads slowly and tracks your visit. This one runs locally, shows no ads, and gives you the same numbers in under a second.

EMI vs. monthly payment, and what's included

'EMI' and 'monthly payment' describe the same thing: the fixed amount you pay each month on an amortizing loan. Your EMI covers principal and interest only — property tax, homeowners or auto insurance and lender fees are billed separately (often through escrow on a mortgage), so budget for those on top.

Everything here runs entirely in your browser; your loan numbers are never uploaded, making this a fast, private way to plan a car, home, personal or mortgage loan and decide what you can comfortably afford.

The EMI formula unpacked — with a worked example

The standard EMI formula is EMI = P × r × (1 + r)ⁿ ÷ [(1 + r)ⁿ − 1], where P is the principal loan amount, r is the monthly interest rate (annual rate ÷ 12, expressed as a decimal), and n is the total number of monthly instalments. To see it in action: a home loan of ₹10,00,000 (₹10 lakh) at an annual rate of 8.5% for 20 years gives r = 0.085 ÷ 12 ≈ 0.007083 and n = 240 months. Plugging those in yields an EMI of approximately ₹8,678 per month — totalling ₹20,82,720 repaid on a ₹10 lakh principal, meaning the borrower pays more than double the borrowed sum over two decades.

The formula produces a level payment for the life of the loan, but what is happening inside that payment changes every month. In the first month of the ₹10 lakh example, the interest charge alone is ₹10,00,000 × 0.007083 ≈ ₹7,083, leaving only ₹8,678 − ₹7,083 = ₹1,595 to reduce the principal. Because the balance has barely moved, month two's interest is almost as large. This front-loading of interest is not a lender quirk — it is a direct consequence of how the formula keeps the monthly payment constant while the outstanding principal falls: the same fixed EMI must first extinguish the period's interest, and only the remainder chips away at principal.

This also explains why early prepayment is so powerful. In the first few years the principal balance is near its peak, so every rupee of extra payment eliminates what would otherwise generate compounding interest for the remaining life of the loan. A ₹50,000 lump-sum prepayment in month 6 of the above loan saves far more total interest than the same ₹50,000 paid in year 18, when the balance — and the interest riding on it — is already small.

Amortization schedule: how each EMI splits over time

An amortization schedule is a row-by-row ledger of every payment showing, for each period, the opening balance, the interest portion of the EMI, the principal portion, and the closing balance after repayment. Using the ₹10 lakh / 8.5% / 20-year example: in month 1, interest = ₹7,083 and principal repaid = ₹1,595. By month 120 (halfway through), the outstanding balance has fallen to roughly ₹6.25 lakh, so the interest portion of the same ₹8,678 EMI is now about ₹4,427 — and the principal portion has grown to ₹4,251. By the final month, almost the entire EMI goes to clearing the last sliver of principal and virtually no interest is due.

The key concept behind this structure is reducing-balance interest (also called diminishing-balance). Interest is calculated on the current outstanding principal, so as the balance shrinks, so does the interest charge, and the surplus of each fixed EMI that goes to principal grows steadily. This is the norm for all legitimate bank loans globally. It contrasts sharply with a flat-rate loan, where interest is computed on the original principal for every period regardless of how much has been repaid — making the true cost dramatically higher than the headline rate suggests. A flat rate of 8.5% is roughly equivalent to a reducing-balance rate of 15–16%; always confirm which method a lender is quoting before comparing offers.

Understanding the amortization schedule is also critical for evaluating balance-transfer offers. If you are in the first third of a loan's life, the outstanding balance is still high and a rate saving of even 0.5–1% can justify the transfer fee. If you are beyond the halfway point, most of the interest has already been paid and the benefit of switching narrows considerably — a fact clearly visible in the closing-balance column of a full schedule.

Fixed vs. floating rate EMIs — which should you choose?

A fixed-rate loan locks in the interest rate — and therefore the EMI — for the entire tenure. What you see on day one is what you pay on day 3,650. This predictability is valuable for budgeting and insulates you from rate hikes, but fixed rates are typically set 0.5–1.5% higher than prevailing floating rates to compensate the lender for taking on rate risk. In practice, Indian banks rarely offer truly fixed rates beyond 2–5 years; most so-called 'fixed' products reset periodically.

A floating-rate loan links the rate to a benchmark — historically the MCLR (Marginal Cost of Funds based Lending Rate), and since October 2019, RBI mandates that all new floating-rate retail loans be pegged to an external benchmark such as the RBI repo rate or a T-bill rate (collectively known as EBLR — External Benchmark Lending Rate). When the RBI cuts the repo rate, floating-rate borrowers benefit within the reset period (typically quarterly); when the RBI raises rates, the EMI — or the residual tenure — rises. EBLR-linked loans are more transparent than MCLR loans because changes in the repo rate pass through almost immediately rather than being smoothed by the bank's own cost of funds.

As a rule of thumb: choose a fixed rate when rates are at cyclical lows and you need budget certainty (especially for first-time homebuyers with thin income buffers). Choose a floating rate when rates are high and likely to fall — you capture the downside automatically — or when your loan tenure is long enough that the starting-rate advantage compounds meaningfully. For most long-tenure home loans (15–30 years) in a normal interest-rate environment, floating rates have historically resulted in lower total interest paid, but the difference narrows if rates stay elevated for an extended period.

Prepayment, foreclosure and how extra payments reshape a loan

Prepayment means paying more than the scheduled EMI in a given month; any surplus goes directly against the outstanding principal. Because interest is calculated on the diminishing balance, reducing principal early eliminates a disproportionate amount of future interest. On a 20-year home loan, making just one extra EMI per year — 13 payments instead of 12 — can cut the effective loan tenure by approximately 3–4 years and save tens of thousands of rupees in interest. The mechanism is simple: the extra payment shrinks next month's opening balance, which reduces next month's interest charge, which means a slightly larger share of the regular EMI that follows goes to principal — and this effect compounds for the remaining life of the loan.

When you make a large lump-sum prepayment, most lenders offer two options: reduce the EMI (keep the same tenure but pay less each month) or reduce the tenure (keep the same EMI but finish sooner). In almost every scenario, reducing the tenure saves more total interest, because the principal exits the loan earlier and stops accruing interest altogether. Reducing the EMI is better only if your monthly cash flow is under genuine pressure.

Foreclosure means paying off the entire outstanding principal before the scheduled end date. Under RBI guidelines (circular DBOD.No.Dir.BC.56/13.03.00/2011-12 and subsequent circulars), banks and NBFCs cannot levy foreclosure charges on floating-rate loans to individual borrowers — a significant consumer protection. For fixed-rate loans, charges typically range from 2% to 5% of the outstanding principal. To check whether foreclosure makes financial sense, compare the interest saving over the remaining tenure against the foreclosure fee: if you have, say, ₹8 lakh outstanding, 7 years remaining at 9%, and a 2% foreclosure fee of ₹16,000, the interest saving over those 7 years would likely exceed ₹2.5 lakh — making the fee a rounding error relative to the saving.