Car Loan Calculator
Work out your monthly auto loan payment and total interest from the vehicle price, down payment, trade-in, sales tax, APR, and term.
- Free, no account
- No watermark
- No usage limit
About the Car Loan Calculator
Most car loan calculators show you a monthly payment and quit. That's the number a dealer wants you locked onto, because it's the easiest one to massage. Stretch the loan another year and a $483 payment quietly becomes $414. That feels like a win, but it isn't, because you just handed the bank a few hundred more dollars in interest for the privilege of a smaller monthly bill.
This one builds the loan you're actually signing, price plus sales tax plus any dealer fees, minus your down payment and trade-in, plus whatever you still owe on that old car, then puts all five common terms next to each other so you read the real cost instead of the comfortable one. It's free, it runs in your browser, and nothing you type is uploaded. The numbers stay on this device between visits, so the trade-in figure you had to go and look up is still there tomorrow.
Punch in a $30,000 car, $5,000 down, 6% APR, 60 months and you get a payment around $483 on a $25,000 loan. Change any field and every number moves at once, so you can poke at the term and the down payment before you're sitting across from a finance manager, not after.
How to use
- Enter the vehicle price. The number you're negotiating, sticker minus any discount. Leave tax out, the calculator adds it on its own line.
- Enter the APR. The rate the lender quoted. If you're weighing a lease, that's a money factor, not an APR, so convert it first (there's an FAQ on that below).
- Pick a term. Tap 36, 48, 60, 72, or 84, or type your own. This is the biggest single dial on your monthly payment.
- Add your down payment. Flip between a dollar amount and a percent. Every dollar down is a dollar you don't borrow interest on.
- Enter your trade-in, and what you still owe on it. If the old car isn't paid off, the payoff balance rolls into the new loan. The tool handles that and warns you if it puts you underwater.
- Set your sales tax rate, then open the fees drawer for doc, title, and registration. You decide whether fees ride inside the loan or get paid in cash at signing.
- Read the results, then compare. You get the payment, the amount financed, total interest, and the true all-in cost, with the compare-terms table showing every term side by side. Want it gone sooner? The extra-payments section shows how much time and interest a little extra kills, plus a payoff date and a downloadable schedule.
Leave a box empty, or let your down payment and trade cover the whole car, and you get a dash instead of a broken number, with nothing crashing or going strange on you.
The monthly payment is the number dealers want you watching
A lower monthly payment can quietly be the more expensive deal. A longer loan spreads the same borrowed money over more months, so each payment shrinks, but you're paying interest for longer and the total climbs. On that $25,000 loan at 6%, moving from 60 months to 72 drops the payment from about $483 to $414. Except your total interest goes from roughly $4,000 to about $4,830. You traded $69 a month for more than $800 handed to the lender.
The compare-terms table exists so you never take that on faith. It runs your exact loan and rate across 36, 48, 60, 72, and 84 months and stacks the payment against the total interest for each, your chosen term highlighted. One look tells you when a "great low payment" is really a long, costly loan in disguise. Most calculators make you re-run the math five separate times to see this. Here it's already on the screen.
Long terms carry a quieter risk too. Cars lose value fast, a new one can drop a fifth of its worth the day you drive it off the lot. Early payments are mostly interest, so the balance falls slowly while the value falls quickly, and for a good stretch of a 72 or 84 month loan you owe more than the car would sell for. You can also run the problem in reverse. The extra-payments section shows that even $50 a month toward principal can shave months off the loan and cut the interest, and it hands you the payoff date plus a CSV of the whole schedule.
What you actually finance
The sticker isn't the loan. What you borrow is the price, plus sales tax, plus any fees you roll in, minus your down payment and trade-in credit. The calculator breaks out each of those lines so you can watch tax and fees push the number up and your cash pull it back down. On a $30,000 car with 8% tax and no trade, you're financing closer to $27,400 than $30,000, and that higher figure is what interest runs on.
First, the trade-in tax break. In most states you pay sales tax only on the price after your trade credit, not the full sticker. On a $30,000 car with an $8,000 trade at 8%, that's tax on $22,000 instead of $30,000, about $640 you keep. A checkbox lets you match your state's rule, since a handful tax the full price regardless.
Second, the car you still owe money on. If your trade is worth $8,000 but you owe $10,000 on it, the dealer clears your old loan and folds that $2,000 gap into the new one. Now you're financing part of a car you no longer drive. That's negative equity, being upside down, and the tool flags it the moment your payoff beats the trade value, so you see the exact number before it vanishes into a longer loan. Rolling that gap forward, deal after deal, is how people end up owing thousands more than anything in their driveway is worth.
Frequently asked questions
Does a trade-in actually lower my sales tax?
In most states it does, but a handful tax the full sticker no matter what you trade in, California and Virginia among them, so it's worth checking your own state before you count on the savings. The tool switches the credit on automatically once you enter both a trade value and a tax rate, and the checkbox lets you turn it off to match a full-price state. If you're not sure which rule yours follows, your state DMV or department of revenue spells out whether trade-in value comes off the price before tax.
Is a lease "money factor" the same as an APR?
No, and the gap catches people. A lease quotes a money factor, a tiny decimal like 0.00125, instead of a percentage. Multiply it by 2,400 to get the rough APR, so 0.00125 works out to about 3%. That small-looking decimal hides what is often an ordinary or even mediocre rate. This calculator is built for loans, so convert the money factor to an APR first, then enter that.
Can I use this to check a refinance?
Yes, and it's one of the better uses. Put your current payoff balance into the vehicle price field, set the down payment and trade-in to 0, then enter the new rate and the months you'd have left. Compare the total interest it shows against what's still owed on your existing loan. If the new total is lower and your lender has no real prepayment penalty, refinancing puts the difference back in your pocket.
Can I deduct car loan interest on my taxes?
For a personal car, no, that interest isn't deductible. The exception is business use. If you drive the car for your business or self-employment, the share of interest tied to that use can generally be written off, and you'd track the business-versus-personal split yourself. For a regular commuter, the interest is just a cost, which is one more reason to keep the rate and term tight.
Why is my used-car rate higher than a new-car rate?
Lenders treat a newer car as safer collateral because its value is more predictable, so the same borrower usually gets a lower APR on new than on used. Automakers also subsidize new loans with promotional 0% and 1.9% deals that used cars rarely qualify for. So when you're torn between a cheaper used car and a new one, run both here with each real rate and compare the total you'd pay, not the sticker. The rate gap sometimes eats the used car's price advantage.
Does this save or upload my numbers?
Uploaded, never. Every calculation runs on your own device and nothing you enter is sent to a server. Saved is a different answer, because the numbers sit in your own browser, which is how the deal you built at the kitchen table is still on screen when you get to the lot. Clearing your browser data clears them too. The page keeps working offline once it has loaded, so you can run scenario after scenario even with bad signal. If you want a second opinion, the share button builds a link that reopens the calculator with your exact figures. The money in it sits after the # in the link, the part a browser never sends to a server, so the price, your down payment and what you still owe on your trade do not reach one on the way. Anyone you send that link to can read them, and the Share row spells out which numbers are in there before you copy it.