APR Calculator

APR Calculator turns a quoted interest rate plus the fees charged for arranging a loan into a single comparable figure. That is the whole point of an APR: two lenders can advertise the same rate and charge very different amounts, and the only way to compare them is to express the fees as extra interest.

The arithmetic asks one question. You receive the loan minus the fees; you pay back a fixed monthly amount calculated on the full loan. What rate, applied to what you actually received, produces those payments? That rate is the APR, and on a 10,000 loan at 8% with 300 of fees over three years it comes out above 10%.

Fees have more effect on a short loan than a long one, which is counter-intuitive until you see why: the same fee is spread over fewer payments, so it raises the effective rate further. A 300 fee on a one-year loan is a far worse deal than the same fee on a five-year one, even though the cash amount is identical.

This is the APR as a nominal annual rate compounded monthly, the convention consumer lending uses. Statutory APR formulas differ slightly between countries and sometimes include or exclude particular charges, so use this to compare offers rather than to audit a regulated disclosure.

This is arithmetic, not financial advice. It tells you what the numbers do; it cannot tell you whether a decision is right for your circumstances. Fees, taxes and local rules vary, so check anything that matters against the actual offer and speak to someone qualified before committing.

Everything is worked out inside your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged or stored, which matters for the financial calculators in particular: the figures you put into them are nobody else's business.

• Shows apr, monthly payment, quoted rate, total cost of credit and fees add this much rate together, so you are not running it twice
• A results table you can read across
• Prints the formula with your own figures substituted in
• Updates as you type, with no button to press and no page reload
• Copy the result in one click
• Free, no sign-up, and it runs entirely in your browser

The apr calculator is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

• Comparing two loan offers with different fees
• Checking whether a low advertised rate survives its arrangement fee
• Seeing what a broker fee costs in rate terms
• Working out the true cost of a short-term loan
• Explaining to somebody why the APR is higher than the rate they were quoted