The minimum payment, in real dollars — a calculator
Type your balance and APR. See what the minimum actually costs, and what a fixed monthly payment gets you instead.
Nothing you type leaves the browser. No accounts, no sign-in, no saved history — a calculator that does not know who you are.
Paying only the minimum
Paying $180 every month
A fixed $180 a month saves about $6,900 in interest and gets you out roughly 16 yrs 4 mo sooner than paying only the minimum.
Why this is true
The minimum payment on a US credit card is usually the month’s interest plus one percent of the balance, with a floor of around twenty-five dollars. It is designed to keep the account current, not to pay it off — which is why it takes decades even at modest balances.
Because the minimum is a percentage of the balance, it shrinks as the balance shrinks. Progress slows precisely as you make it. A fixed payment does the opposite: it stays the same size while the interest portion of it shrinks, so every month more of it lands on principal. That is the whole difference between the two curves on this page.
The arithmetic runs on your inputs, in your browser, month by month. No pre-computed lookup tables; no server call. If you change a number, the whole schedule reruns. If your card’s minimum formula differs (a few use 2% or a higher floor), the direction of the answer will not change — only its size.
When a card is connected, Plumb reads the live balance and APR from the account itself and runs this same arithmetic on your actual numbers.
Plumb is financial education, not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice.