Mortgage Calculator

What This Actually Tells You

Plug in a home price, your down payment, the rate, and how many years you want to pay it off — the monthly principal-and-interest number updates as you type. That's the whole point: instead of redoing the amortization math by hand every time you want to test "what if I put down 25% instead of 20%," you just change a number and watch the payment move.

What Each Field Actually Means

Home price is the full purchase price, before anything comes off it.

Down payment comes off the top — home price minus down payment is your real loan amount (the principal). Cross the 20%-down line and PMI typically disappears from the equation on a conventional loan; that threshold matters more than most first-time buyers expect.

Interest rate is the annual number your lender quotes. The calculator handles the annual-to-monthly conversion itself, since payments happen every month, not once a year.

Loan term is how many years you're committing to. 30 is the default most people reach for, but it's not the only option — see below for why 15 exists too.

The Math Underneath

M = P × [r(1 + r)ⁿ] ÷ [(1 + r)ⁿ − 1] — the standard fixed-rate amortization formula. P is the loan amount, r is the monthly interest rate, n is the total number of payments. It looks intimidating; what it actually does is spread the loan into equal monthly payments where the early ones lean almost entirely toward interest and the later ones lean almost entirely toward principal — same payment size, a completely different mix underneath, month after month.

What This Number Doesn't Include

This is principal and interest only — the "P&I" half of what lenders usually call PITI. The rest of your actual monthly bill:

• Property taxes — usually collected monthly and held in escrow
• Homeowners insurance — often escrowed too
• PMI — required on most conventional loans under 20% down, gone once you cross that line
• HOA dues — if the property has one

Depending on where you live, these can tack on several hundred dollars a month — enough that ignoring them is the single most common way people misjudge what a house actually costs to own.

Why Your Rate Isn't Everyone's Rate

Two people buying the same house on the same day can walk away with meaningfully different rates. What moves it:

• Credit score — the biggest lever most borrowers actually control
• Down payment size — more skin in the game, lower perceived risk, often a better rate
• Term length — 15-year loans are consistently priced below 30-year ones
• Loan type — conventional, FHA, VA, and jumbo are all priced on their own curve
• Points — paying upfront to buy the rate down

15 Years or 30? The Real Tradeoff

A 15-year loan gets paid off in half the time and saves a genuinely large amount in total interest — but the payment jumps 40-50% higher for the same loan amount, since the same principal is squeezed into half as many payments. A 30-year loan keeps the monthly number lower and more forgiving, at the cost of paying meaningfully more interest over the life of the loan. Neither one is "correct" — run both above and compare the actual dollars for your own numbers before picking.

Where People Get This Wrong

• Budgeting for P&I only — then getting blindsided by taxes and insurance at closing.
• Not shopping the loan around — rates and fees genuinely vary lender to lender; a few quotes taken close together can be worth thousands over the life of the loan.
• Borrowing up to the approval limit — what a bank will lend you and what you can comfortably live with are two different numbers, and only one of them matters to your actual life.
• Missing the PMI cliff — if you're a few thousand dollars short of 20% down, closing that gap can be worth more than it looks on paper.
• Picking the shorter term without stress-testing it — make sure the 15-year payment survives a bad month, not just an average one.

Financing something that isn't a house? The general Loan Calculator handles any fixed-rate loan. Trying to work out how much cash you'd need upfront at a given percentage? Use the Down Payment Calculator.