Debt Snowball Calculator

What Is the Debt Snowball Method?

The debt snowball method pays off debts in order from smallest balance to largest, regardless of interest rate. You keep making the minimum payment on every debt, but any extra money you can spare goes entirely toward the smallest balance. Once that one's gone, its old minimum payment doesn't disappear — it gets added to the extra amount and rolled into the next-smallest debt, so your payoff power grows with every debt you clear. That's the "snowball": a small amount at the start builds into a much bigger monthly payment by the end.

Mathematically, paying the highest-interest debt first (the "avalanche" method) usually saves a bit more in total interest. The snowball trades a small amount of that savings for something a lot of people find more valuable in practice: quick, visible wins that make it easier to stay motivated through a long payoff plan.

How to Use This Calculator

List each debt's current balance, its interest rate, and its minimum monthly payment — you can enter up to four. Then enter any extra amount you can put toward debt on top of your minimums each month (leave it at 0 to see your minimums-only timeline). The calculator sorts your debts smallest to largest automatically and shows you the order to attack them in.

How We Calculate It

Each month, interest is added to every debt that still has a balance. Your total monthly budget — the sum of all your minimum payments plus your extra amount — first covers every debt's minimum. Whatever is left over goes entirely to the debt with the smallest remaining balance. As soon as that debt hits zero, its minimum payment joins the pool of money going toward the next-smallest debt the very next month. We run this simulation forward, month by month, until every balance reaches zero, and compare it against a baseline of paying only minimums with no snowball extra.

A Few Notes

This calculator assumes fixed interest rates and that you apply your extra payment consistently every month — real life has more variables than that, so treat the result as a planning estimate rather than an exact schedule your lender will match. If a minimum payment doesn't even cover that debt's monthly interest, the balance will grow instead of shrink no matter how long you wait — the calculator will flag this rather than show you a payoff date that will never actually happen.