Mortgage Calculator

How to Use This Mortgage Calculator

Put in a price and a rate and see what the house really costs you every month. Principal, interest, tax, insurance and PMI in one number, not just the figure a rate table quotes.

Start with the price and the down payment. Those two give you the amount you're actually borrowing, and everything else falls out of that. Add the rate and the term and you've got the principal and interest figure rate tables advertise.

That figure isn't your payment. Open the taxes and insurance section and put in property tax, homeowners insurance, HOA dues, and a PMI rate if you're putting down less than 20%. Now the result card shows your whole monthly cost broken into its parts, and that's the number to hold up against your rent. Underneath it sits an extra payment box. Anything you type there goes straight to the principal and shortens the schedule.

Scroll past the result for the amortization schedule, year by year or month by month. You can take the same figures away as a PDF, an image, a CSV or an Excel workbook.

How much house can I afford?

This page answers the question the other way round, so you'll need to work backwards. Decide what you can put toward housing each month, knock off a realistic figure for tax, insurance, HOA and PMI, and whatever survives is your principal and interest budget. Feed that into the affordability mode of the loan calculator and it tells you the loan that payment supports. Add your down payment and you have a price to shop at. A lender will almost certainly approve more, which is exactly why it pays to turn up with a number of your own.

Mortgage Payment Formula

Your mortgage payment is two parts pulling in opposite directions. The interest part is whatever you still owe multiplied by the monthly rate, so it shrinks every month. The principal part is whatever's left over, so it grows by exactly the same amount. The total never moves. That's the whole point of an amortized loan: the payment you make in year one is the payment you make in year thirty.

Here's the formula behind that flat payment:

M = P × [ r(1 + r)ⁿ ] ÷ [ (1 + r)ⁿ − 1 ]

• M is the monthly principal and interest
• P is the amount borrowed, so price minus down payment
• r is the annual rate divided by 12, as a decimal
• n is the number of monthly payments, so years times 12

None of that formula covers property tax, home insurance, HOA dues or PMI. Tax, insurance and HOA just get divided by twelve and stuck on top. PMI is charged on the amount you borrowed and stuck on as well. That's why your real payment beats anything a mortgage rate table shows you, and why it drops the day PMI comes off.

Mortgage Payment Example: $350,000 Home at 6.5%

Here is what the calculator gives you for a $350,000 home with $70,000 down, which is 20%, on a 30 year loan at 6.5%, with $3,500 a year in property tax and $1,600 a year in insurance.

Sit with two of those lines for a moment. Look at the gap between $1,769.79 and $2,194.79: tax and insurance add $425 a month before you've paid for anything else. Then look at the interest total, which over the full term costs more than the house did. In the first five years alone you hand over $88,298.19 in interest, and the balance crawls from $280,000 down to $262,110.79.

What Is PMI and When Does It End?

Private mortgage insurance is what a conventional lender charges when you put down less than 20%. It protects them, not you. Expect it to run somewhere between 0.3% and 1.5% of the loan each year, bolted onto your monthly payment.

The good news is it doesn't last forever. Two separate moments matter:

• At 80%, you can ask. Under the Homeowners Protection Act you can request cancellation on the date your balance is scheduled to fall to 80% of the home's original value, meaning the purchase price or the appraisal at the time you bought, whichever was lower. You have to ask in writing, and your payments have to be current.
• At 78%, it ends on its own. Your servicer has to terminate PMI automatically on the date the balance is scheduled to reach 78% of that same original value, as long as you're current on payments. There's a backstop too: it must end the month after the midpoint of the amortization schedule, which on a 30 year loan means after 15 years.

What this calculator assumes: PMI stops at 80%, the earliest point you can act on. That's the best case, and it only happens if you make the request. Do nothing and PMI runs on to 78%, costing you a few months more than the figures here show.

Here's what that's worth in money. The same $350,000 home with 10% down means borrowing $315,000. At a 0.5% PMI rate that's $131.25 a month sitting on top of $1,991.01 of principal and interest, and on the scheduled balance it runs for 96 months. You pay $12,468.75 before it comes off.

One catch people miss: paying extra brings the balance down faster than the schedule does, but cancellation at 80% goes off the scheduled balance unless you ask for it early against the actual one. If you're overpaying specifically to kill PMI, tell the servicer, and budget for an appraisal.

Property Taxes, Insurance and Escrow

Most lenders would rather not trust you to save up for a tax bill, so they collect it monthly instead. An escrow account, called an impound account in some states, is set up by the lender to pay property-related expenses, and the money in it comes out of your monthly payment. Property tax and homeowners insurance go in. Principal and interest do not.

That has consequences. Any payment quoted on a rate table leaves escrow out, so the real number is always higher than advertised. The escrow portion is only an estimate, so it gets recalculated, and if your assessment or your premium rises your monthly payment rises with it even on a fixed-rate loan. Worse, a shortfall discovered at the annual review lands as a lump sum or a raised payment, usually with very little warning.

Go back to the example above. $3,500 of tax and $1,600 of insurance works out at $425 a month, close to a quarter of the whole payment. HOA dues, if you have them, sit alongside and usually go straight to the association rather than through escrow. The calculator adds all of it, so the total on screen is the total you would really pay.

15-Year vs. 30-Year Mortgage

Same $280,000, same 6.5%, two very different loans:

The 15 year payment is $669.31 higher, about 38% more, and it saves you $198,086.82 in interest. Lenders price shorter terms a little cheaper as well, so in practice the gap is usually wider than this single-rate comparison suggests.

The catch: that higher payment isn't optional. A 30 year loan with extra payments gets you most of the way there and still leaves you a choice in a bad month. Put $200 a month extra against the 30 year loan and it clears in 273 months instead of 360, saving $101,283.54. Less than the 15 year term saves, yes, but nobody can hold you to it.

How to Lower Your Mortgage Payment

• Compare lenders inside a short window. Mortgages are one of the loan types where credit scoring models group rate shopping together. FICO ignores inquiries from the 30 days before scoring, and counts several mortgage inquiries inside a 14 or 45 day window, depending on the model version, as one. Comparing five lenders in two weeks costs you almost nothing.
• Put down 20% if you can reach it. You skip PMI altogether instead of carrying it for eight years, and you borrow less while you're at it. If that is out of reach, get the PMI cancellation date in writing at closing and put it in your calendar.
• Decide about points deliberately. One discount point is 1% of the loan amount, paid at closing to buy the rate down. How far it comes down depends on the lender, the loan and the market, so points only pay off if you stay long enough to earn the cost back. Work out the break-even in months before you agree to anything.
• Challenge the escrow side. You can appeal a property tax assessment, and you can re-quote insurance every year. Neither one touches your rate, and in the example above they account for $425 of a $2,194.79 payment.
• Take the longer term and pay extra. You get the lower required payment in the months you need it and most of the interest saving in the months you don't. The same trick works on any other borrowing, over in the loan calculator.

Mortgage Calculator FAQ

Sources

Where the PMI, escrow and points rules on this page come from. The math is ours, and we set out how we do it in the methodology.

• When can I remove private mortgage insurance (PMI) from my loan? — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• What is private mortgage insurance? — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• What is an escrow or impound account? — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• How should I use lender credits and points (also called discount points)? — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• Credit report inquiries — myFICO

Reviewed by Usman Ali · September 2026