Student Loan Calculator

Student Loan Calculator treats a student loan as what most of them are: an amortising loan with a delayed start. The repayment, the total interest and the schedule all follow from the balance, the rate and the term, exactly as they would for any other loan.

The grace period is the part worth paying attention to. On most loans interest accrues during the months before repayment begins, and in many cases it is then capitalised -- added to the balance -- so you start repaying more than you borrowed and pay interest on the interest. On a 40,000 loan at six per cent, a year of grace adds nearly 2,500 before the first payment. The checkbox turns capitalisation off if your loan pays the interest separately.

One important limitation. Income-contingent systems, such as the English and Australian ones, do not work like this at all: repayment is a percentage of income above a threshold, nothing is due below it, and any balance left after a set period is written off. For those, the monthly figure here is not what you would pay, and the total is not what you would owe.

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 monthly repayment, total interest, total repaid, added during grace and repaid in together, so you are not running it twice
• Full year by year you can open and check
• 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 student loan calculator is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

• Working out repayments on a private student loan
• Seeing what a year of deferment adds to the balance
• Comparing a ten-year term with a fifteen-year one
• Checking what overpaying by 100 a month saves