All Mortgage & Loan Calculators

How to choose the right calculator

With more than ten tools, the fastest way to the right answer is to start from your goal rather than the calculator's name. Broadly, the tools fall into two groups: those that help you buy a home, and those that help you manage or leverage a home you already own. Within each group, a couple of calculators do most of the heavy lifting, and the rest refine a specific part of the decision.

If you are just starting out, size a payment with the main mortgage calculator, confirm your budget with the pre-approval and debt-to-income tools, and, if you are torn between renting and owning, run the rent vs buy calculator. If you already own, the refinance, cash-out refinance, recast, home equity loan and HELOC calculators cover every way to lower a payment or turn equity into cash.

Calculators for buying a home

Buying is a sequence of questions, and there is a tool for each. The mortgage calculator answers "what would the monthly payment be?" by combining principal, interest, taxes, insurance, PMI and HOA into a single PITI figure. The pre-approval calculator works the other direction, starting from your income and debts to estimate the maximum a lender is likely to approve, which is the number that actually bounds your search.

Because approval hinges on your debt-to-income ratio, that calculator shows exactly where you stand against the 36%–43% thresholds lenders use, and what paying down a card or auto loan would do for your buying power. If a low down payment is your path in, the FHA calculator models a 3.5%-down loan including the mortgage insurance premium, and the rent vs buy calculator settles the more basic question of whether buying beats renting on your timeline. Used together, these five tools take you from "can I afford this?" to a confident offer.

Calculators for refinancing and home equity

Owning a home opens a second set of decisions, and the tools here help you make them with real numbers instead of a lender's pitch. A refinance calculator shows whether a new rate lowers your payment enough to justify the closing costs, and how long the break-even takes. A recast calculator covers the lesser-known move of making a lump-sum payment and re-amortizing to a lower payment while keeping your existing rate, which is powerful when that rate is one you would not want to give up.

When the goal is to tap equity rather than lower a payment, three tools compare the options: the cash-out refinance replaces your whole loan with a larger one and hands you the difference; the home equity loan adds a fixed-rate second loan with predictable payments; and the HELOC calculator models a revolving line with its interest-only draw period and later repayment. Seeing the three side by side is the clearest way to pick the cheapest way to borrow against your home. For borrowers weighing an adjustable rate, the ARM calculator lays the low intro payment against a worst-case adjusted payment so the risk is visible up front.

How our calculators work

Under the hood, every tool uses the same standard amortization mathematics that lenders and loan officers use. From a loan amount, interest rate and term, the calculator derives the fixed monthly principal-and-interest payment, then builds a schedule showing how each payment chips away at the balance, heavy on interest early, heavy on principal later. Onto that it layers the escrow items, property tax and homeowners insurance, plus PMI and HOA where they apply, to produce the full PITI payment your lender actually collects.

Two design choices set these apart. First, they run entirely in your browser: nothing you type is transmitted or stored, so you can model sensitive income and debt figures with complete privacy and no sign-up. Second, they never invent an interest rate for you, you supply a rate from a real quote or today's average, which keeps every estimate grounded in numbers you can actually get rather than a marketing figure.

What makes a mortgage calculator trustworthy

Not all calculators are equal. Many free tools online quietly omit taxes and insurance, which can understate a real payment by hundreds of dollars a month, or they gate the full result behind an email capture that turns you into a sales lead. Ours do neither. Every payment includes the full PITI breakdown, the amortization schedule is shown in full, and there is no form standing between you and the answer.

Accuracy also depends on honest inputs and honest labels. Where we show representative figures, such as typical prices or effective tax rates, we label them as representative and date them, and where data can be made current, like the median list prices on our state pages, we refresh it automatically and show the date. The result is a set of tools you can trust for a real decision, not a lead-generation funnel dressed up as a calculator.

Localized estimates for your state

A national estimate can be off by a wide margin once local property taxes, loan limits and assistance programs are factored in. That is why we publish a dedicated calculator for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., each pre-set with the local property-tax rate and the current 2026 conforming and FHA loan limits, and each explaining the state's down-payment assistance, closing costs and transfer taxes. If you know where you are buying, start there: browse mortgage calculators by state to open the page for your state and get an estimate tuned to your market.

Reading your results: PITI and amortization

Two concepts unlock every result these calculators produce. The first is PITI, the four parts of a real housing payment: principal (the slice that pays down your balance), interest (the lender's charge), taxes (local property tax collected into escrow) and insurance (your homeowners premium, also escrowed). A payment quoted as "principal and interest only" can be hundreds of dollars short of the true monthly cost, which is why our tools total all four, plus PMI and HOA where they apply.

The second is the amortization schedule. Even though your payment stays level on a fixed-rate loan, its makeup shifts every month: early on, most of the payment is interest and little goes to principal; over time that reverses, and the balance falls faster. The schedule makes this visible payment by payment, and it is where you can see the real cost of a longer term or the savings from extra payments. Understanding both ideas turns a single number into a decision you can defend.

Getting the most accurate estimate

A calculator is only as good as the numbers you feed it, so a few habits sharpen every result. Use a rate from an actual quote or preapproval rather than a guess, since even a quarter-point changes the payment and the lifetime interest. Enter the local property-tax rate for the specific county or town, not a national average, and get a real homeowners insurance quote for the exact property, because both vary widely by location and risk. If your down payment is under 20% on a conventional loan, include PMI; for condos and planned communities, add the HOA dues.

Finally, test more than one scenario. Run the payment at a couple of prices, compare a 15-year term against a 30-year, and see what a larger down payment or a lower rate does. Modeling the range, rather than a single point, is how you find a payment that stays comfortable if life changes, and it costs nothing but a minute in a tool that never sends your numbers anywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions