Payday loan true-cost engine
Typical pricing — data as of June 2026
Loan amount
Term (days)
Fee per $100
Advertised cost
$56.25
Total to repay
$431.25
Rent clears on the first, and Tasha's paycheck lands on the ninth. She is $375 short. The storefront by the pharmacy will cover it for "$15 per $100," which her brain files next to an ATM charge. It is not an ATM charge. The calculator above converts that quote into the two numbers that actually describe the deal: the annualized rate, and the total she must produce in 14 days. Enter your own amount, term, and fee, and read both before anything gets signed.
How to use this calculator
Three steps, all anonymous. Nothing you set here is sent anywhere.
- Start from a preset scenario. The buttons at the top load common combinations, from a $200 two-week loan to a $500 loan over a monthly cycle, at typical fees. Pick whichever is closest to your situation.
- Enter your own quote with the steppers. Move the amount, the term in days, and the fee per $100 with the plus and minus controls until they mirror the lender's paperwork or website quote.
- Read the annualized APR and total repayment. The right panel shows the flat fee, that same fee restated as a true APR, a bar splitting principal from fees, and the lump sum due on your payday.
The steppers also make this a what-if machine. Hold the amount steady and stretch the term: the fee stays flat while the APR falls, which shows why lenders never mind a longer nominal term. Then bump the fee per $100 by one step and watch the annualized rate jump by whole double digits. Small-print differences between storefronts are not small.
How payday pricing works
Payday lenders do not quote an interest rate. They quote a flat fee per $100 borrowed, payable when the whole loan comes due on your next payday. Market fees run from $10 to $30 per $100 depending on the state, with $15 the common storefront price. Many statutes call the product a deferred deposit rather than a loan at all. The label changes; the cost does not.
Turning that into an APR is arithmetic, and the calculator does it live: divide the fee by the amount borrowed, multiply by 365 over the term in days. Take the typical loan of $375 for 14 days at $15 per $100. The fee is $56.25, the payoff is $431.25, and the annualized rate is 391% APR. Across the market's fee range, payday APRs land between 261% and 782%.
The second half of the price structure is access. To get the loan you hand over a post-dated check or an ACH authorization, so on payday the lender collects first, before rent, groceries, or the electric bill get a vote. If the account comes up short, the bank may bounce the debit and add its own charge, commonly around $27 per item, stacking a second cost on top of the first. That collection priority, more than the fee itself, is what gives a payday shortfall its speed.
Why the APR looks so huge
Fair question, and the industry's favorite one. A 14-day term annualizes by a factor of about 26, so even a modest-sounding fee explodes when you restate it per year. Nobody borrows for a year, the argument goes, so the 391% figure is a scare number.
Here is the honest version. Yes, annualizing a two-week price is brutal on the sticker. But APR is the only yardstick that lets you compare this loan against a credit card near 22%, a credit-union loan capped at 28%, or anything else on your table. And the "nobody borrows for a year" defense collapses on contact with the CFPB's own finding: most payday borrowers do not use the loan once. They renew it. The moment a loan rolls over, the annualized rate stops being hypothetical and becomes the price you are actually paying, cycle after cycle.
There is a simpler tell, too. If annualized pricing were genuinely unfair to this product, lenders would happily put fourteen-day APRs on their billboards. They put the fee per $100 there instead, because it is the smallest honest-looking number the deal can produce.
The rollover multiplier
A rollover repeats the entire fee while the principal stands still. That single sentence is the whole payday debt trap. On the typical $375 loan, each extension costs another $56.25. Three consecutive rollovers add $168.75 on top of the original $56.25 fee. Total paid in fees: $225.00, which is 60% of everything that was borrowed, and the $375 principal is still owed in full. Nothing was paid down. The borrower is four fees poorer and exactly as indebted as on day one.
That is a mechanism, not bad luck. The lump-sum structure aims the full payoff at the same strained paycheck that made the loan necessary, which is why regulators in several states now ban rollovers outright. CFPB research found the bulk of payday fee revenue comes from borrowers stuck in exactly this loop, not from the one-time users the marketing describes.
A note on vocabulary, because it hides in the statistics. In states that ban rollovers, lenders report loans repaid on time. What often happens instead is re-borrowing: the borrower pays off $431.25 on Friday and takes a fresh $375 loan on Monday, because the payoff emptied the account. Economically it is the same treadmill with one extra step, and the calculator prices it identically: a full fee per cycle, principal never falling.
Cheaper routes for the same gap
A Payday Alternative Loan from a federal credit union is capped at 28% APR with at most a $20 application fee, repaid in installments over 1 to 12 months instead of one balloon payment. Earned-wage apps advance up to $500 of pay you have already worked for; a typical instant-transfer fee of about $5 is far fewer dollars than a payday fee, even though it still annualizes near 180% on a short advance. For slightly larger or longer needs, installment loans and the options in our small loans guide keep repayment in scheduled pieces. Full product-by-product detail lives in the payday loans online guide.
Before any product, two phone calls are free. The creditor you cannot pay may offer a hardship plan or a due-date shift at no cost, and many employers can advance earned wages through payroll with no lender in the loop at all. If a loan still makes sense after those calls, price at least two of the options above with real numbers before defaulting to the nearest storefront.
Considering borrowing against a vehicle instead? Run that quote through the title loan calculator before you decide; the monthly-rate framing hides even more than the fee-per-$100 framing does.