How to Find How Long to Pay Off a Loan with NPER in Excel

Work out how many months a credit card balance takes to clear at a fixed payment, and what it costs in interest.

You will learn to

• Count the payments needed to clear a balance
• Round up to whole payments
• Estimate total interest paid

How it works

NPER(rate, pmt, pv) returns how many payment periods it takes to pay off a balance. For a card balance of $6,800 at 22.9% APR with $250 monthly payments, =NPER(22.9%/12,-250,6800) gives about 38.7 months.

The result is fractional because the last payment is smaller; wrap it in ROUNDUP to count actual payments. Multiply the periods by the payment and subtract the balance to estimate the total interest.

=NPER(B3/12,-B4,B2)