Loan EMI Calculators
Work out the EMI on any loan before you talk to a bank. Each calculator shows the monthly instalment, the total interest you would pay, and how the interest share falls over the tenure (reducing balance).
How an EMI is actually calculated
Every bank loan in India uses the reducing-balance method: each month, interest is charged only on the principal still outstanding, and whatever part of your EMI is not interest goes toward reducing that principal. The EMI itself stays constant, but its composition shifts — in the early years most of it is interest, and only near the end does the principal share dominate. That is why a loan statement after three years of payments can show a balance that has barely moved: you have mostly been paying interest so far, exactly as the amortisation schedule in these calculators shows.
This also explains why prepaying early in the tenure saves far more than prepaying late. A lump sum paid in year 2 cancels principal that would otherwise have accrued interest for the remaining 18 years; the same sum in year 18 saves almost nothing.
Rate vs tenure: which lever matters more
Borrowers negotiate hard on the rate and then casually stretch the tenure — usually the more expensive mistake. Take ₹30 lakh at an illustrative 9%: over 20 years the EMI is about ₹26,992 and total interest about ₹34.8 lakh. Stretch to 30 years and the EMI falls only to about ₹24,139 — a relief of under ₹3,000 a month — while total interest jumps to about ₹56.9 lakh. Ten extra years of payments buy ₹22 lakh of extra interest for a small monthly saving.
The practical use of an EMI calculator is exactly this comparison: fix the loan amount, then try the shortest tenure whose EMI your monthly budget genuinely absorbs, rather than the longest one the bank will sanction. Our guide to FOIR and loan eligibility explains how banks decide what that ceiling is.
Prepayment, foreclosure and the fine print
For floating-rate loans to individual borrowers, RBI rules bar banks from charging prepayment or foreclosure penalties — so a floating-rate home loan can be chipped away with bonuses and increments at no cost. Fixed-rate loans and business loans are a different matter: foreclosure charges of a few percent of outstanding principal are common, and personal loans often lock you in for the first twelve EMIs. Check the product pages on each bank’s hub for the specific rules we track.
Whether to prepay at all is a real question once you could instead invest the money — our prepay-or-invest guide works through that trade-off.
The flat-rate trap
Some lenders — especially for car and consumer loans — quote a flat rate: interest computed on the full original principal for the whole tenure, ignoring that you repay as you go. A flat rate understates the true cost badly; over a typical tenure it corresponds to a reducing-balance rate roughly 1.8× as high, so a “7% flat” car loan is really a ~12–13% loan in the terms every other lender uses. All calculators on this site use the reducing-balance convention, so if a dealer quotes you a flat rate, convert before comparing.