Student Loan Avalanche Calculator
The avalanche method ranks your student loans from highest interest rate to lowest and directs every spare dollar at the top-rate loan while you pay minimums on the rest. This approach always minimises total interest cost across the full set of loans. Enter each loan above to see your avalanche payoff schedule and the interest you save.
Highest rate first saves you
Difference between the two orders
in interest, against paying the smallest balance first — and you clear everything by .
On these balances the two orders finish in the same place — pick the one you will actually stick to.
- Same budget, two ordersAvalancheSnowball
- Debt-free in
- Interest paid
- Debt-free on
Avalanche order
Every dollar you free up when a loan clears rolls onto the next one in both plans — that is the only fair way to compare them. Total monthly budget: .
At these minimums and rates at least one balance grows faster than you are paying it down, so neither order ever finishes. Raise a minimum payment or the extra amount.
Minimum payments and rates are yours to enter. Interest is compounded monthly on each loan. If a minimum payment is smaller than that loan's monthly interest, the balance grows and the plan will not finish.
How the Avalanche Works Step by Step
List every loan with its balance, rate and minimum payment. Sort them from highest rate to lowest. Each month, pay the minimum on every loan except the one at the top of the list; send that loan every dollar you can afford above the combined minimums. When it reaches zero, take the entire amount you were paying on it and add it to the minimum of the next loan in line. Repeat until every balance is cleared.
The power of this approach comes from stopping the most expensive interest first. A dollar applied to an 8% loan saves twice as much daily interest as the same dollar applied to a 4% loan. Over a multi-year payoff, those daily savings compound into a significantly lower total cost compared with any other ordering method. The avalanche-vs-snowball tool shows the exact dollar difference between the two strategies for your specific set of loans.
Where Avalanche Struggles and What to Do About It
The avalanche method has one well-known weakness: if your highest-rate loan also carries a large balance, it can take many months before you eliminate a single loan from the list. That long stretch without a visible win discourages some borrowers. Discussions on personal-finance forums are full of people who switched to snowball after stalling on a stubborn high-rate balance because they needed the motivational boost of clearing a loan entirely.
A practical compromise is to start with one quick snowball win on a small balance to build momentum, then switch to strict avalanche ordering for the remainder of the payoff. You lose a small amount of interest optimality but gain the motivational boost of crossing a loan off early. The payoff-order tool lets you experiment with custom orderings, and the which-loan-first guide walks through additional factors beyond rate alone that can influence your order.
The calculator assumes extra payments are applied to principal on the target loan immediately. Confirm your servicer applies funds the same way before starting.
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Related student loan calculators
- Highest Interest or Smallest Student Loan First?
- Multiple Student Loans Payoff Order Calculator
- Which Student Loan Should I Pay Off First?
Sources
-
Standard amortisation formula; avalanche method as commonly described in consumer-finance literature.
- Federal Direct Consolidation Loan interest rate — the weighted average of the loans being consolidated, rounded up to the nearest one-eighth of one percent (Federal Student Aid, studentaid.gov, Loan Consolidation).
- Amortisation, daily interest accrual and payoff arithmetic — standard loan mathematics; every figure on this page is computed from the numbers you enter.