Debt Snowball vs. Avalanche Calculator
List your debts below to see how long each payoff strategy would take, how much interest you'd pay, and which one wins for your specific numbers.
Your debts
Results
Snowball (smallest balance first)
| Months to debt-free | — |
|---|---|
| Total interest paid | — |
Avalanche (highest rate first)
| Months to debt-free | — |
|---|---|
| Total interest paid | — |
How this calculator works
Both strategies pay the minimum on every debt each month, plus one lump "extra payment" that gets thrown entirely at a single target debt. The two methods differ only in which debt they target first. The snowball method orders your debts from smallest balance to largest and attacks the smallest one first — the psychological payoff of eliminating a whole debt quickly can help you stay motivated, even though it isn't always the cheapest path. The avalanche method instead orders debts from highest interest rate to lowest and attacks the highest-rate debt first, which is mathematically guaranteed to minimize the total interest you pay over time.
In both methods, once a debt is fully paid off, the money that used to go toward its minimum payment doesn't disappear — it gets added to the extra payment pile aimed at the next target debt in line, so your total monthly outlay stays the same while your payoff snowballs (or avalanches) faster and faster.
Avalanche usually saves more money because it knocks out the interest that compounds fastest first. But snowball sometimes wins in practice anyway: paying off a whole account, even a small one, produces a visible win that keeps people paying down debt instead of giving up partway through. Neither approach is wrong — the "best" one is whichever one you'll actually stick with. This calculator runs the real numbers on your specific debts so you can see exactly how big the difference is before you choose.