How to Find the Principal Portion of a Payment with PPMT in Excel

Track how much of a food-truck loan payment actually reduces the debt, from the first month to the last.

You will learn to

• Find the principal in a given payment
• Inspect the final payment
• Compute the balance after a payment

How it works

PPMT(rate, per, nper, pv) returns the principal part of payment number per. Together with IPMT it splits each PMT exactly: PPMT + IPMT = PMT. For an $85,000 loan at 8.5% over 7 years, =PPMT(8.5%/12,1,84,-85000) shows the first payment repays $744.02.

Principal grows every month as interest shrinks, so the last payment is almost all principal. Subtract the principal paid from the loan to get the remaining balance.

=PPMT(B3/12,1,B4*12,-B2)