Estimates, not advice —
and here is the difference.

When a tool here reports that a $420,000 loan at 6.5% over 30 years costs $2,654.69 a month, that is a fact about the numbers you entered. It is not a statement that you can afford the payment, that the rate is competitive, that the house is worth the price, or that borrowing is the right decision. Those are questions about your life, and no calculator has the inputs for them.

Nothing on this site is financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice, and using it creates no advisory relationship. We do not know your income, your debts, your tax position, your risk tolerance or your plans, and we are not regulated to advise you on any of them.

The practical consequence is worth spelling out, because it is the one people get wrong: a result that looks affordable is not an approval, and a result that looks unaffordable is not a rejection. Lenders assess applications on criteria no public calculator sees — credit history, employment stability, reserves, the property itself, and their own appetite that quarter.

For anything with real money attached, the figures here are a starting point for a conversation with someone who can see your whole position: a fee-only financial planner, a mortgage broker, a CPA or a tax professional.

This is the part of a disclaimer that is actually useful. Each tool declares what it deliberately ignores, that declaration appears on the tool's own page, and the complete set is gathered here so you can see the shape of it at once. The list is generated from the calculators themselves, so it cannot fall behind them.

Read it as a map of where a figure stops being reliable. A mortgage payment that excludes closing costs is not wrong; it is answering a narrower question than "what will this house cost me", and the difference at settlement can run to several percent of the price.

Amortization Calculator

• It does not model prepayment penalties, which some loans carry and which can absorb part or all of the saving from paying early.
• Whether a servicer accepts fortnightly payments, and whether it applies each on receipt or holds it until a full monthly payment accumulates, varies by servicer. A plan that holds payments captures less than this schedule shows, and third-party biweekly services sometimes charge a setup or per-payment fee that is not modelled here.
• Interest-only periods, balloon payments, deferred interest and negative amortisation are not modelled. Every schedule here fully repays the loan over the term.
• It assumes extra payments reduce principal rather than being held as a credit toward the next instalment, which is a servicer-specific behaviour worth confirming in writing.
• Simple-daily-interest loans, common in some auto lending, accrue by the day rather than by the period, so a payment made early or late changes the interest in a way this schedule does not capture.
• It says nothing about whether paying a loan down early is the best use of the money. A 4% mortgage and a 24% credit card are not the same decision, and neither is compared here against saving or investing instead.

Break-Even Calculator

• This says nothing about whether the volume is achievable. A break-even of 223 units is a fact about your costs; whether 223 customers exist at that price, and what reaching them would cost, are questions about a market this page has no view of.
• Selling more usually costs more, and none of that is modelled. Advertising, sales staff, extra shifts and larger premises are the normal price of higher volume, and each of them raises the fixed costs, which raises the break-even again.
• The costs are treated as cleanly fixed or cleanly variable. Real ones often are not — the SBA calls the in-between category semi-variable, costs that are fixed up to a level of production and variable beyond it — and the standard treatment is to split each into its fixed and variable parts before entering it here.
• Fixed costs are assumed to stay fixed across the whole range, which stops being true at some volume. Capacity has steps in it: another oven, another van, another lease, and each step moves the break-even up rather than along.
• One product only. A business selling several at different contribution margins has a break-even that depends on which ones sell, and a blended figure will be wrong in whichever direction the mix moves.
• No tax, no financing and no working capital. Break-even is not the same as having cash: a business at break-even on paper can still run out of money if customers pay in sixty days and suppliers want thirty.
• A single month, in isolation. Seasonal businesses do not break even evenly through the year, and a monthly figure from an annual average will be comfortably wrong in both directions.
• Nothing here is a forecast or a valuation. It converts a cost structure into a volume and stops; it has no opinion on growth, on whether the business is a good idea, or on what it is worth.

Budget Calculator

• This cannot tell you whether your budget is good. It reports three percentages and the distance from one book’s framework; whether that distance matters depends on your income, your rent, your household and your obligations, none of which is arithmetic.
• The framework it measures against is very likely unreachable for a large share of US households. Measured: housing, transport, food and healthcare alone were 71.2% of average household spending in 2024 against a 50% needs allowance, so being over that line is the normal case rather than a diagnosis.
• Wants are entered as a single total, so nothing here identifies which discretionary spending to change. That is deliberate — itemising ten wants fields produces a longer form and the same total — but it means the page cannot point at a specific subscription.
• Where a line belongs is your judgement and the page cannot check it. Groceries against restaurants, and minimum against overpayment on debt, are the two that most change the result, and a plausible-looking set of shares can come from a consistent misfiling.
• Nothing here is forecast. There is no rate, no projection and no compounding: this is one month divided three ways, and it says nothing about where the saving share leads over a decade.
• Irregular and annual costs are invisible unless you convert them to monthly amounts yourself. A budget that balances in eleven months and breaks in the twelfth looks identical here to one that works.
• Variable income is not modelled. For commission, shift or self-employed pay there is no single take-home figure, and running this on a good month produces shares that do not describe the year.
• No priority order is suggested between saving, investing and clearing debt. A 24% card balance and a savings account are not interchangeable uses of the same dollar, and choosing between them is outside what a budget split can answer.
• This is not advice about what to spend. Showing what your money currently does, and how that compares with a published framework and with measured averages, is not a recommendation about what any share of it should be.

Compound Interest Calculator

• Taxes are not modelled at all. Dividends, interest and realised gains may be taxable each year in a regular brokerage account and not in a tax-advantaged one, which can make a large difference to the same nominal projection. Your rate, your account type and your jurisdiction all matter and none of them appear here.
• Fees and expense ratios are ignored, and this omission is larger than it looks. Costs are levied on the whole balance every year, so they compound against you exactly as returns compound for you. On a thirty-year horizon a single percentage point of annual cost is not a detail — it is a structural change to the result. Enter a rate net of expected costs if you want the projection to reflect them.
• Volatility is not modelled. This grows the balance at one smooth rate, and a real portfolio delivering the same average return would arrive by an entirely different path. The order in which good and bad years fall — sequence of returns — can change the outcome substantially, and matters more the larger the balance has become.
• It cannot tell you what rate to assume. There is no default that is correct for a particular portfolio, and the 7% here is a round illustrative figure rather than a claim about any asset class.
• The inflation adjustment uses one rate for everything. Actual inflation varies by year and by category, and the things a specific person spends money on — housing, healthcare, education — have often not tracked the general index.
• Contributions are fixed in nominal terms, which means their real value falls across the term. Someone contributing $500 a month for thirty years is contributing progressively less in purchasing power each year.
• The effective annual rate reported alongside a contribution stream is a money-weighted figure, not a rate of return and not an APY. It is lower than the rate you entered because later contributions compound for less time, and comparing it with a quoted rate is not a meaningful comparison.
• This is not advice on whether to invest, what to invest in, or whether this plan suits your circumstances. It is one arithmetic scenario, and its usefulness depends entirely on assumptions you supplied.

Credit Card Payoff Calculator

• The shrinking-minimum mode does not describe your issuer's formula. Every major US cardmember agreement we read sets the minimum as the greatest of several amounts, one of which adds the billed interest and fees to a percentage of the principal, with a dollar floor in the mix — a structure that always repays the balance, unlike a flat percentage on its own. The details differ enough between issuers that the same balance produces different minimums at each, and some use tiered percentages rather than one rate. Use the fixed-payment mode with the figure from your statement if you want your own schedule.
• One rate only. A real card can carry a purchase APR, a cash-advance APR and one or more promotional rates at the same time, and payments above the minimum are allocated to the highest-rate balance first. This models a single balance at a single rate.
• No fees. Annual fees, late fees, over-limit fees, cash-advance fees and foreign transaction fees are all excluded, and each one lengthens a real payoff.
• No promotional or deferred-interest periods. A 0% introductory rate, and the deferred-interest structure common in store financing where the whole accrued balance becomes payable if the balance is not cleared in time, are both outside this model.
• No balance transfers. A transfer fee is typically a percentage of the amount moved, and whether a transfer helps depends on that fee, the promotional length and the rate afterwards — none of which this page asks for.
• Average daily balance and daily compounding are not modelled. Real interest is usually slightly higher than the monthly figure here for the same nominal APR.
• This is arithmetic, not advice. It does not know your income, your other debts or which balance to clear first, and it has no view on whether paying a card down is the right use of the money.

Debt Payoff Calculator

• No fees of any kind. Annual fees, late fees and origination costs are excluded, and each one lengthens a real payoff.
• Interest-rate changes are not modelled. A variable-rate card repriced mid-payoff will move the result, and can move which strategy wins.
• No promotional or deferred-interest periods, and no balance transfers. A 0% window that expires partway through changes the correct ordering entirely, and this model has no way to express it.
• No tax treatment. Interest on some debts — a mortgage, certain student loans — may be deductible, which lowers its effective rate and can reorder an avalanche. Nothing here accounts for it.
• No credit-score effects. Paying a revolving balance down changes utilisation and a score in a way an instalment loan does not, and this model cannot see that.
• No view on whether to pay debt at all. Matching an employer retirement contribution, or keeping an emergency fund, can be worth more than retiring a low-rate debt early. This page compares two orderings; it does not compare debt payoff against other uses of the money.
• Debts that are in collections, default, or under a hardship or forbearance arrangement do not behave like this. Nor do debts where a settlement is being negotiated.
• This is arithmetic, not advice. It does not know your income, your job security or what else the money is needed for.

Debt-to-Income Ratio Calculator

• This is not a lending decision. Credit history, assets, residual income, employment stability and the loan itself all weigh alongside the ratio, and none of them appear here.
• It does not model FHA, VA or USDA underwriting, which apply their own ratios and their own compensating factors.
• Self-employed and variable income is usually averaged over two years by a lender, and may be calculated quite differently from the figure you would naturally enter.
• Student loans in deferment or on income-driven repayment plans are counted inconsistently between lenders — some use the actual payment, some a percentage of the balance — so the right figure to enter is genuinely ambiguous.
• It says nothing about whether a ratio is comfortable for you. Gross income ignores tax, childcare, medical costs and retirement saving, all of which come out of the same money.
• A ratio inside every convention does not mean borrowing more is wise, and a ratio outside them does not mean an application is hopeless.

Emergency Fund Calculator

• This cannot tell you how many months you need, and the figure it defaults to is a convention rather than advice. How replaceable your income is, how many people depend on it, and whether your work is salaried, commissioned or self-employed all move the answer, and none of them is arithmetic.
• A months-of-expenses target is only one of the two methods in circulation. The CFPB suggests sizing the fund from what your own past unplanned expenses actually cost, which for some households produces a substantially smaller and more reachable number than any multiple of monthly outgoings.
• No inflation adjustment is applied. On a long timeline the target is stated in today’s money while the expenses it is meant to cover will have risen, so a target years out is understated in real terms.
• No return is modelled, which understates the outcome slightly for anyone holding the reserve in an interest-bearing account. That is a deliberate trade: overstating what a cash buffer will grow to is the more dangerous error of the two.
• The contribution is treated as fixed and uninterrupted. A timeline measured in dozens of months will in practice be broken by the events the fund exists for, and this page has no way to model that.
• Nothing here weighs saving against paying down debt. A balance at 24% APR costs more than a cash reserve earns, and the usual resolution — a small starter fund first, then the debt, then the rest — is a judgement this calculator does not make for you.
• Household composition is outside the model. Two incomes, one income, dependants and access to family support change how much reserve a given figure represents, and none of them appears in the arithmetic.
• The Federal Reserve figures quoted on this page describe how US adults answered a survey in October 2025. They are context for your own position, not a benchmark to be measured against, and the spread by income is wide enough that the headline number describes few people precisely.
• This is not advice about what to do with money. Showing what a reserve costs and how long it takes is not a recommendation about the size of yours, where to keep it, or what to fund first.

Inflation Calculator

• No published price index is used. The Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains the CPI for exactly this purpose and this calculator does not read it, so the result reflects your assumption rather than any measured series.
• The general price level is not your price level. The BLS states plainly that the CPI "does not necessarily measure your own experience with price change", and a household whose spending is concentrated in housing, healthcare or education may have faced a very different rate from the headline one.
• A single constant rate is the largest simplification here. Real inflation clusters — long quiet periods broken by sharp episodes — and a constant-rate model cannot show the difference between a decade of 3% and a decade averaging 3% with a spike in the middle.
• The result is arithmetic, not a forecast. Nobody can tell you what inflation will be over your horizon, and the sensitivity of the answer to that unknowable input is high: at ten years, moving the assumption from 2% to 4% changes what $10,000 buys from $8,203.48 to $6,755.64.
• Taxes, fees and returns are all outside the model. A sum actually held somewhere earns or costs something, and this page deliberately isolates the inflation effect from all of it.
• Annual compounding is assumed. Prices do not move in yearly steps, and a monthly or continuous treatment would give slightly different intermediate figures, though the difference is small beside the uncertainty in the rate itself.
• CPI series are not interchangeable and the BLS warns against assuming they are. Its guidance recommends the US City Average for escalation, notes that local-area indexes carry substantially larger sampling errors, and states that seasonally adjusted data are inappropriate for adjustment agreements. None of that is modelled here because no series is used at all.
• This is not advice about what to do with money. Showing that purchasing power erodes is not a recommendation to invest, and certainly not a recommendation about where.

Investment Return Calculator

• This is a measurement, not a projection. A return achieved over one period is not evidence that the same return will be available over the next, and the page makes no claim about the future in either direction.
• The annualised figure is smoothed and path-blind. Derived from two endpoints alone, it reports the same placid rate for an investment that fell by half and recovered as for one that rose evenly, and the difference between those two experiences is substantial.
• Cash added or taken out during the holding period is not modelled. If you contributed along the way, the correct measure is a money-weighted return such as an internal rate of return, and the figure here will be wrong — usually flatteringly so, because later money is treated as though it had been there from the start.
• Taxes are absent entirely. Realised gains, dividends and interest may be taxable, the treatment depends on the account and the jurisdiction, and an after-tax return can differ substantially from the figure shown.
• Inflation is not accounted for. A nominal 8.45% a year over five years is a smaller real return, and for long holding periods the difference matters more than most of the other simplifications here.
• Ongoing costs are not distinguished from one-off ones. The fees field takes a single total, so an annual expense ratio charged on a growing balance is not modelled as such.
• It cannot tell you whether the return was good. That depends on what else was available, what risk was taken to get it, and how the alternatives performed over the same period — none of which this calculator knows.
• Dividends and distributions must already be reflected in the final value you enter. If they were paid out and spent rather than reinvested, the value shown understates the return, and the calculator has no way to detect that.

Margin & Markup Calculator

• This cannot tell you what margin your business needs. That depends on your fixed costs, your volume, your sector and your competition, none of which appears here, and a per-unit percentage is silent about all four.
• Gross figures overstate what you keep, sometimes by a lot. Payment processing alone is typically a low single-digit percentage of the price, and returns, shipping and shrinkage come out of the same profit; a business with healthy gross margins can still lose money.
• One unit at a time, one price at a time. Real pricing spans a range of products cross-subsidising each other, and the blended margin across a catalogue is not the margin of any item in it.
• The Census Bureau figures quoted on this page are US retail estimates by kind of business for 2022, published in the Annual Retail Trade Survey — which has since been folded into the Annual Integrated Economic Survey. They describe what firms measured, at an industry level, and are not a target for any individual business. Several detailed industries in that table are suppressed for quality reasons and are not quoted here.
• Nothing here is a tax computation. Gross profit in the sense used by IRS Publication 334 is an accounting figure built from net receipts and cost of goods sold across a year, including inventory movements this page has no view of.
• Cost is treated as fixed and known. In practice it moves with order quantity, supplier terms, freight and currency, and a margin computed from last quarter’s landed cost is a historical statement rather than a current one.
• No allowance is made for the price a market will actually bear. The arithmetic will happily produce a price that no customer pays, and a target margin is a wish rather than a plan until something confirms demand at that price.

Mortgage Affordability Calculator

• This is not a pre-approval and not a lending decision. A lender underwrites your credit history, employment record, assets and the property itself, none of which appear here.
• Closing costs are not modelled. They typically run several percent of the price and come out of the same savings as your down payment, so the cash you can actually put down is usually less than the cash you have.
• It does not model FHA, VA or USDA loans, which use different ratios and different mortgage insurance rules entirely.
• It assumes your existing debt payments stay as they are. A loan that ends in two years frees that capacity up; a growing card balance does the opposite.
• It says nothing about whether you SHOULD borrow this much. The ratios ignore childcare, medical costs, retirement saving and how secure your income is.
• Student loans in deferment or on income-driven plans are counted differently by different lenders, so the figure you should enter for them is genuinely ambiguous.

Mortgage Calculator

• Closing costs, origination fees, points and prepaid interest are not included. They can add several percent of the purchase price at settlement.
• This is not an APR calculation. APR folds fees into an effective rate; this shows the payment your note actually specifies.
• It does not model escrow shortfalls or surpluses, tax reassessments, or insurance premium changes.
• It does not check whether you would qualify for the loan. For that, use the affordability calculator.
• Mortgage interest deductibility is not modelled, because whether it benefits you depends on whether you itemise.

Savings Goal Calculator

• The rate is an assumption you supply, not a rate this page has found for you. Nothing here checks what any institution is currently paying.
• It does not model the risk of the return. Entering an equity-like rate produces the same tidy monthly figure as entering a deposit rate, but a market-invested balance can be worth less than you put in on the day you need it — and for a goal three or four years out, that is not a remote possibility.
• A target set in today's dollars buys less by the deadline. Reaching $50,000 in five years means reaching $50,000 of future money, which is worth less than $50,000 is now.
• Taxes are outside the model, and they are not negligible on a large cash balance at a meaningful rate.
• It assumes a single account with one rate. It does not model splitting a goal across a CD ladder, a high-yield account and a brokerage balance, which is how a larger goal is often actually held.
• Deposit insurance limits are not considered. FDIC coverage is generally $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, per ownership category, so a cash target approaching that figure at one institution needs thought about where the money sits.
• It says nothing about whether the goal itself is the right priority — ahead of high-interest debt, an emergency fund, or an employer retirement match.

UK Take-Home Pay Calculator

• It does not apply Scottish Income Tax. If you are a Scottish taxpayer, the Income Tax figure here is wrong, though National Insurance is the same UK-wide.
• It does not model salary sacrifice. Sacrifice reduces your gross pay itself, so it lowers National Insurance as well as Income Tax — the pension field here does not.
• It does not read your tax code. A code other than the standard one, an underpayment being collected, or emergency tax will all change what you actually receive.
• It does not handle a second job or multiple employments, where the Personal Allowance is split across employers and the result depends on how the codes are allocated.
• It does not calculate bonuses in the month they are paid. A bonus is taxed for the year, but PAYE deducts it in one period, so a single payslip can look far worse than the annual figure.
• It shows employee National Insurance only. Employer contributions are a cost to your employer and never appear on your payslip as a deduction.
• It does not model benefits in kind, student loan Plan 3 (postgraduate doctoral), the High Income Child Benefit Charge, or the tapering of the annual pension allowance.

Each tool also states its assumptions on its own page, beside the formula. The conventions they share — rounding, rate conversion, the treatment of the final payment — are set out on how we calculate.

Most of the site is built for the United States. That is not only a matter of currency formatting: it decides how a nominal annual rate is converted to a periodic one, which debt-to-income thresholds are treated as conventional, and when private mortgage insurance terminates.

These tools encode US-specific rules and should not be relied on elsewhere without checking the local equivalent:

• Amortization Calculator
• Budget Calculator
• Compound Interest Calculator
• Credit Card Payoff Calculator
• Debt-to-Income Ratio Calculator
• Emergency Fund Calculator
• Inflation Calculator
• Investment Return Calculator
• Mortgage Affordability Calculator
• Mortgage Calculator
• Savings Goal Calculator

These encode United Kingdom tax rules, for a stated tax year, and are wrong anywhere else:

• UK Take-Home Pay Calculator

Read the scope note on those pages before trusting a figure. UK Income Tax is set separately by Scotland, so a tool covering England, Wales and Northern Ireland does not describe a Scottish taxpayer — each page says which countries it applies to, and which tax year.

The remainder are jurisdiction-free arithmetic — the order in which to attack several debts, for instance, does not change by country — though the tax treatment of whatever you are calculating almost certainly does.

Only the tools named above as tax calculators model tax. Everywhere else — capital gains, the deductibility of mortgage interest, the treatment of a tax-advantaged account — returns and payments are gross figures, and the after-tax number is lower, often by enough to change a decision. Where a tool could plausibly be read as including tax, its own page says that it does not. Where a tool does model tax, it names the authority it took every rate from and the date those rates were checked.

Each calculator loads with a default value in every field so that the page shows a working result immediately. Those defaults are illustrative round numbers. They are not current market rates, they are not indicative of what you would be offered, and they are not updated as markets move — for a real rate, ask a lender.

Anything describing the future is a projection from assumptions you supplied, which is a different thing from a forecast. A compound-growth figure assumes a constant rate of return, contributions that never falter, and no fees; real portfolios do none of those. A savings goal reached in eleven years on this page is reached in eleven years if every assumption holds, and they will not all hold.

Past performance does not indicate future results. Where a tool measures a return that has already happened, the figure describes that period only — and US securities rules identify the inference from past to future performance as the characteristic misleading use of exactly this kind of number.

The arithmetic is tested against values computed independently of the code that implements it, and we take errors seriously enough to publish how the checking works. Even so, software has defects, and we do not warrant that every figure is free of them. The site is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, and without any guarantee that it will be available when you want it.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss arising from decisions taken in reliance on a figure produced here. That is not a shrug: it is the honest position of a free tool that cannot see your circumstances and does not charge for the privilege.

Sources we cite are linked so you can read them yourself, and we do not control or endorse what is on any external site. The full terms that apply to using the site are on the terms of use page.

If a calculation here disagrees with your lender's figure, your own working, or a source we cite, that is a defect and we want it. A reproducible discrepancy is the single most useful thing anyone sends us. Report it on the contact page.