Before you draw a repayment schedule there are two choices to make, and most people never realise they are choices. The first is the shape of the repayment — whether every payment is the same size, or whether the principal is. The second only matters if you owe more than one debt: which one to attack first. Both have exact answers, both are worked through below, and the second one produced a result that surprised me.
Not financial advice. These templates are calculators and this page is arithmetic. Every figure below is an illustration, no currency is implied, and none of the rates shown is a rate available anywhere — they are inputs to an example. Your lender’s own schedule is the authoritative one. If you are struggling with repayments, behind on a loan, or considering consolidation or any other refinancing, speak to a qualified debt adviser in your country before you commit to anything. This page cannot tell you what to do with your money.
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This page or the amortization schedule?
Two closely related documents, and it is worth knowing which one you actually want:
| Page | Answers |
|---|---|
| Amortization schedule | One loan, in detail. Where each individual payment goes, how much of it is interest, what an overpayment saves, and the Excel formulas to check your lender’s figures. |
| Loan payment schedule — this page | The decisions made before the schedule. Which repayment structure you are on, and in what order to clear more than one debt. |
Free loan payment schedule templates
Nine Excel workbooks. Open one and put your own figures in before you trust anything it shows.
Equal payments, or equal principal?
Almost every consumer loan uses the first of these and never mentions that the second exists. Business and some mortgage lending uses both.
- Equal total payment. The same amount leaves your account every month. Interest is charged on the outstanding balance, so early payments are mostly interest and the principal portion grows over time. This is what “instalment loan” normally means.
- Equal principal payment. You repay the same slice of the debt every month and pay whatever interest has accrued on top. The payments therefore fall over the life of the loan.
Here is what the difference costs. Take 24,000 repaid over 24 months, with interest at 1% a month:
| Equal total payment | Equal principal | |
|---|---|---|
| First payment | 1,129.76 | 1,240.00 |
| Last payment | 1,129.76 | 1,010.00 |
| Total interest | 3,114.32 | 3,000.00 |
| Total repaid | 27,114.32 | 27,000.00 |
So equal principal costs 114.32 less in interest — about 3.7% less — and the price of that is a first payment 110.24 higher. That is the entire trade-off: you pay more at the start, when the debt is largest, and less interest in total because the balance falls faster.
Two practical notes. The equal-principal total is exactly 3,000 here, which is not a coincidence — it is 1% of the sum of the outstanding balances, and because those fall in a straight line the arithmetic comes out clean. And the saving grows with the term: over two years it is small, over twenty it is not. If your lender offers the choice, the question is simply whether you can comfortably afford the higher early payments, which is a question for your monthly budget rather than for a calculator.
More than one debt: which first?
Two methods, and the argument between them is usually framed as arithmetic against psychology. I simulated both month by month, and the framing turns out to be close to backwards.
Three debts, with 600 a month available in total and minimum payments of 75, 35 and 150:
| Debt | Balance | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Card A | 3,000 | 22% |
| Card B | 1,200 | 18% |
| Loan C | 6,000 | 9% |
Pay the minimum on everything, then put every spare penny at one target. The two methods differ only in which target comes first:
| Avalanche — highest rate first | Snowball — smallest balance first | |
|---|---|---|
| Order | Card A, Card B, Loan C | Card B, Card A, Loan C |
| Debt-free in | 19 months | 19 months |
| Total interest | 1,007.08 | 1,038.39 |
| First debt cleared | Month 8 | Month 4 |
Read those last three rows carefully. Both methods finish in the same nineteen months. Paying the highest rate first saves 31.31 in interest — about three per cent of the interest, on nearly ten thousand of debt. Meanwhile the snowball clears the first balance in month 4 rather than month 8, and gets the second one cleared in the same month the avalanche does.
On these numbers the mathematical advantage is almost nothing and the difference in how the first few months feel is large. That is not an argument for either one — it is an argument for running your own figures rather than accepting the received wisdom, because the gap between the methods widens when the rate spread is wider and narrows when it is not. With a 29% card and a 4% loan the avalanche pulls ahead properly; with three cards at similar rates it barely matters which you pick.
What does matter, in both methods, is the two rules they share: pay every minimum, every month, and put the entire surplus at one target rather than spreading it. Spreading is the mistake that makes both methods slow.
Consolidation: watch the term, not the rate
Consolidation replaces several debts with one loan. It is sold on the monthly payment, and the monthly payment is the number least worth looking at. Take the three debts above, 10,200 in total, and three ways of handling them:
| Arrangement | Monthly payment | Total interest |
|---|---|---|
| 19% over 3 years | 373.89 | 3,260.09 |
| 11% over 5 years | 221.77 | 3,106.36 |
| 11% over 7 years | 174.65 | 4,470.50 |
The bottom row cuts the interest rate by eight percentage points and still costs 1,210.41 more in interest than the top row. The monthly payment more than halves, from 373.89 to 174.65, which is precisely why that is the figure in the advertisement. The middle row, same rate and a shorter term, genuinely does save a little.
So the test is not “is the rate lower”. It is: what is the total I will have repaid when this is finished, and is it less than what I am on now? Any consolidation calculation that does not show you that number is not showing you the thing you need. Two further points the arithmetic does not capture: a consolidation loan secured on your home converts unsecured debt into debt that can cost you the house, and clearing cards without closing them leaves the capacity to run the balances up again alongside the new loan. Neither is a reason not to consolidate. Both are reasons to get advice first.
The three figures that decide your options
-
The total you owe, debt by debt, with the rate against each
Not a rough total. Every balance, every rate, every minimum payment, written down on one sheet — a plain printed list works as well as anything, and the act of filling it in is half the value. Most people doing this for the first time find the order of their debts by rate is not what they assumed, and the highest-rate debt is frequently not the largest.
-
What you can pay every month without fail
The honest figure, not the optimistic one, because a plan built on a number you cannot sustain collapses in month three and costs you the fees. Work it out from actual spending over the last few months rather than from an intention.
-
The sum of the minimums
Add every minimum payment together. The difference between that total and the figure above is your entire room for manoeuvre — it is the number that drives everything on this page. If the two are equal or the minimums are larger, no repayment strategy will help and the answer is a debt adviser, not a spreadsheet.
Should I use avalanche or snowball?
This page will not choose for you, and the figures above are why: on one realistic set of debts the two methods finished in the same month and differed by about thirty in interest. Put your own balances and rates into one of the workbooks above and look at both columns. If the interest difference is small, pick whichever you will actually stick to. If it is large, that tells you something too.
Is it better to overpay or to save?
The arithmetic comparison is between the interest rate on the debt and the return you would get on the savings, after tax, and on most consumer debt the debt rate is higher. The arithmetic is not the whole question though — having no accessible cash at all means the next unexpected expense goes back on a card at the rate you just paid off. Many people keep a small buffer and overpay with the rest. Where that line sits is a question for an adviser who knows your circumstances.
Will overpaying definitely reduce my interest?
It depends on how your lender applies it, which is worth checking before you send money. An overpayment applied to the principal stops all the future interest that balance would have generated. An overpayment treated as paying your next instalment early does far less, and some agreements carry early repayment charges. Ask the lender in writing how a lump sum will be applied, and whether the term shortens or the payment falls.
Why does my lender’s schedule not match the template?
Day-count conventions, rounding and the exact dates payments land all move the figures slightly, and different lenders handle each differently. A template is for understanding the shape of a loan and for sanity-checking a statement, not for disputing a balance to the penny. If the difference is more than small change, ask the lender to explain their calculation rather than assuming either side is wrong.
What if the payment I need is more than I can afford?
Then the problem is not which schedule to use, and no template fixes it. Speak to a debt adviser — in most countries there are free, independent services, and they have options available to them that are not visible from the outside. The thing not to do is miss payments silently while hoping it resolves, because the cost of that is fees and charges on top of the interest you already cannot pay.
Can these templates handle a variable rate?
Only by recalculating. A schedule is a projection on the assumption the rate holds, so when the rate changes the projection is stale from that date onward. The practical approach is to redraw the schedule each time the rate moves, keeping the old version, so you can see what the change actually cost over the life of the loan rather than only what it did to the monthly figure.
Does a business loan work the same way?
The arithmetic is identical, and the equal-principal structure described above is more common in business lending than in consumer lending, so the comparison in that section is more likely to be a live choice. What differs is everything around it — security, covenants, personal guarantees and the tax position of the interest. If the loan is for a business, the repayment schedule belongs alongside the forecasts in the business plan rather than in a personal budget.
For a debt that will still be running in a decade or more, the schedule is also a planning document rather than only a tracker — it tells you what is still owed at a given date, which is the figure a longer-term budget needs and the one people usually guess at.
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