How to Calculate Principal and Interest
If you own a home, you probably know that a portion of what you pay the lender each month goes toward the original loan amount while some gets applied to the interest. But figuring out how banks actually divvy those up can seem confusing.
You may also wonder why your payment stays remarkably consistent, even though your outstanding balance keeps going down. If you understand the basic concept of how lenders calculate your payment, however, the process is simpler than you might think.
Key Takeaways
- Mortgage payments are made up of two components. The principal is the amount of the loan itself and the interest is the monthly amount that the lender charges you on top of the principal.
- With fixed-rate mortgages, your monthly payment is consistent because of a process called amortization.
- In addition to the principal and interest that you pay the lender, your monthly payment may also include other expenses such as mortgage insurance premiums and taxes held in escrow.
Principal and Interest
Each mortgage payment that you make is made up of two main components: principal and interest.
Principal
The principal is the original loan amount not including any interest. For example, let’s suppose you purchase a $350,000 home and put down $50,000 in cash. That means you’re borrowing $300,000 of principal from the lender, which you’ll need to pay back over the length of the loan. However, the bank also charges a fee for lending you those funds, which is represented by the interest portion of your payment.
Interest
Sticking with our example, let’s say the loan is a 30-year mortgage with a 4% annual interest rate. Since you’re making monthly, rather than annual, payments throughout the year, the 4% interest rate gets divided by 12 and multiplied by the outstanding principal on your loan. In this example, your first monthly payment would include $1,000 of interest ($300,000 x 0.04 annual interest rate ÷ 12 months).
If you plug your purchase price, your down payment, the length of your loan, and your APR (see more on this below under “Interest Rate vs. APR”) into the Investopedia Mortgage Calculator, you will see that your monthly payments to the lender would equal $1,432.25. As we noted earlier, $1,000 of your first payment strictly covers the interest cost, meaning the remaining $432.25 is paying down your outstanding loan balance or principal.
Of course, the example above doesn’t include other costs, such as mortgage insurance and property taxes held in escrow, which are not paid to the lender.
How Amortization Works
You may be wondering why your mortgage payment—if you have a fixed-rate loan—stays the same from one month to the next. In theory, that interest rate is being multiplied by a shrinking principal balance. So shouldn’t your monthly bill get smaller over time?
The reason that’s not the case is that lenders use amortization when calculating your payment, which is a way of keeping your monthly bill consistent. As a result, your monthly payment is comprised of mostly interest in the early years with a smaller portion of the payment going towards reducing the principal.
Example of Amortization
Assuming you don’t refinance, your loan payment will be the same 15 years later. But by now, you’ve chipped away at your principal balance. In 15 years, you would have a remaining balance of approximately $193,000 of the principal on your loan.
Multiplying $193,000 by the interest rate (0.04 ÷ 12 months), the interest portion of the payment is now only $645.43. However, you’re paying off a bigger portion of the principal, meaning $786.82 of the $1,432.25 monthly payment is going towards the principal.
The table below shows the monthly payments at various points in the 30-year mortgage. You’ll notice that the interest portion of the monthly payment declines while the principal portion increases over the life of the loan.
During the last year of your mortgage, you’re paying off mostly principal and very little interest. By leveling out your payments like this, lenders are making your payments more manageable. If you paid the same amount in principal over the course of the loan, you’d have to make much higher monthly payments right after taking out the loan and those amounts would plummet at the tail end of the repayment.
If you’re wondering how much you’ll pay toward principal versus interest over time, the Investopedia Mortgage Calculator also shows the breakdown of your payments over the length of your loan.
Adjustable-Rate Mortgages
If you take out a fixed-rate mortgage and only pay the amount due, your total monthly payment will stay the same over the course of your loan. The portion of your payment attributed to interest will gradually go down, as more of your payment gets allocated to the principal. But the total amount you owe won’t change.
However, it doesn’t work that way for borrowers who take out an adjustable-rate mortgage, or ARM. They pay a given interest rate during the initial period of the loan. But after a certain length of time—say, one year or five years, depending on the loan—the mortgage “resets” to a new interest rate. Often, the initial rate is set below the market rate at the time you borrow, and then increases following the reset.
Suddenly, you’ll notice that your monthly payment has changed. That’s because your outstanding principal is being multiplied by a different (usually higher) interest rate.
Interest Rate vs. APR
When receiving a loan offer, you may come across a term called the annual percentage rate, or APR. The APR and the actual interest rate that the lender is charging you are two separate things, so it’s important to understand the distinction.
Unlike the interest rate, the APR factors in the total annual cost of taking out the loan, including fees such as mortgage insurance, discount points, loan origination fees and some closing costs. It averages the total cost of borrowing over the duration of the loan.
It’s important to realize that your monthly payment is based on your interest rate, not the annual percentage rate. However, lenders are required by law to disclose the APR on the loan estimate they provide after you submit an application, so that you can have a more accurate picture of how much you’re actually paying to borrow that money.
Some lenders may charge you a lower interest rate but charge higher upfront fees, so including the APR helps provide a more holistic comparison of different loan offers. Because the APR includes associated fees, it’s higher than the actual interest rate.
How Is My Interest Payment Calculated?
Lenders multiply your outstanding balance by your annual interest rate, but divide by 12 because you’re making monthly payments. So if you owe $300,000 on your mortgage and your rate is 4%, you’ll initially owe $1,000 in interest per month ($300,000 x 0.04 ÷ 12). The rest of your mortgage payment is applied to your principal.
What Is Amortization?
Amortizing a mortgage allows borrowers to make fixed payments on their loan, even though their outstanding balance keeps getting lower. Early on, most of your monthly payment goes toward interest, with only a small percentage reducing your principal. At the tail end of repayment, that switches—more of your payment reduces your outstanding balance and only a small percentage of it covers interest.
What’s the Difference Between Interest Rate and APR?
The interest rate is the amount that the lender actually charges you as a percent of your loan amount. By contrast, the annual percentage rate, or APR, is a way of expressing the total cost of borrowing. Therefore, APR incorporates expenses such as loan origination fees and mortgage insurance. Some loans offer a relatively low interest rate, but have a higher APR because of other fees.
The Bottom Line
You likely know how much you’re paying to the mortgage servicer each month. But figuring out how that money is divided between principal and interest can seem mysterious. In fact, figuring out how much you’re paying in interest is as simple as multiplying your interest rate by your outstanding balance and dividing by 12. It’s only because lenders adjust the amount credited to your original loan balance that your payments stay remarkably consistent over the years.
