Auto Loan Calculator

Monthly car payment with trade-in, sales tax and dealer fees.

Credit scores run from 300 to 850 on the FICO model, and American pricing splits into tiers near 620, 660, 700 and 740 — a borrower one tier lower can pay two or three points more for the same money. Prepayment penalties are rare on consumer loans in the United States and common on some business facilities.

American car loans are simple-interest installment contracts of 36 to 72 months, and terms lengthened as vehicle prices rose, which leaves more owners owing more than the car is worth. Dealer financing can beat a bank on the headline rate and recover it in fees, and most states charge sales tax only on the trade-in difference.

Consumer borrowing in the United States is priced as an annual percentage rate that folds fees in with interest, so the APR is always at or above the nominal rate.

Installment loans amortise over a stated term, meaning early payments are mostly interest and later ones mostly principal, while revolving card debt runs the other way because the minimum payment is set to stretch the balance over years.

Auto loans commonly run 36 to 72 months, federal student loan rates are reset each year by Congress, and card minimums are typically 1-3% of the balance — each of those choices changes total interest far more than a small rate difference does.

The term decides the cost far more than the headline rate does. Stretching a car loan from 48 to 72 months can lower the payment by a fifth and raise total interest by half, and depreciation usually outruns principal repayment in the first year of a long loan.

Auto Loan Calculator sits with the rest of the library's finance work, and it rests on the same borrowing arithmetic the way a lender's disclosure or a bank statement does. Its answer is only as good as the assumptions standing behind it.

The quantities it works from — auto price, loan term, interest rate, cash incentives and down payment — are the ones a real borrowing question actually turns on, and each carries a convention of its own, set out below.

Money questions in America turn on the same few trade-offs: how long a balance is carried, what rate applies to it, and whether the money is being paid down or built up. Inflation sits behind all of them, since a figure that looks generous at today's prices buys less at tomorrow's, and comparisons across decades are made in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

American products also disclose their costs in prescribed ways, from the APR on a consumer loan to the annual percentage yield on a deposit account.