Loading Income-Driven Repayment Estimator…
The slice shielded before any payment is worked out. Take it from your own scheme; it changes most years.
Schemes differ, and so does the same scheme between one year and the next.
Zero for none. Some schemes cap the payment at what a fixed schedule would have charged.
$191.67
$23,000 a year counts, and 10% of it is split over twelve months.
The payment is below the $200.00 of interest charged each month, so the balance rises by $8.33 a month while you pay every month. That is not a mistake in the arithmetic and it is not unusual on a payment set from income: the debt grows until income rises, the term ends, or the scheme itself absorbs some of the interest.
No scheme is built into this page and none should be read into it. The protected figure, the percentage, the ceiling and the horizon above are whatever you typed. Real schemes set them by statute, revise them annually, vary them by household size and family circumstances, and require you to recertify your income every year — so a figure that was right last year is often not right now. Take all four from your loan servicer or the scheme rules themselves.
The estimate holds your income flat for the whole term, which no career does. It also ignores what happens to a written-off balance: in some systems the amount forgiven is treated as taxable income in the year it is forgiven, which can arrive as a single large bill. Interest is charged monthly on the balance outstanding, and any subsidy your scheme applies to unpaid interest is not modelled here.
Income-driven schemes invert the usual arrangement. Instead of dividing a debt across a term and asking for the result, they shield a slice of your income, take a fixed percentage of whatever is above it, and let the balance land where it lands. Two graduates owing very different sums can therefore pay exactly the same amount, and the size of the debt affects only how the story ends.
Because the payment ignores the balance, the interesting question stops being “when is this repaid” and becomes “what is left at the horizon, and what happens to it then”.
The protected amount, the percentage, any ceiling on the payment and the number of years before a balance is written off are all set by legislation and revised on their own timetable — sometimes yearly, sometimes by a court, sometimes retroactively. They also depend on household size and circumstances in ways a calculator cannot infer from a single income figure.
A tool that hardcoded any of them would give a confidently wrong answer within a year of being written, and nothing about the screen would tell you it had gone stale. So the four parameters are yours to type. Copy them from your servicer, your award correspondence or the scheme rules, and this page will do the arithmetic on the numbers that actually apply to you.
The scheme counts $23,000 of that income. Ten per cent of it is $2,300 a year, or $191.67 a month, and that figure holds whether the balance behind it is $8,000 or $80,000.
Put a $40,000 balance at 6% behind it and the picture changes. Interest on that balance runs at $200 a month, which is more than the payment. Twenty years of paying $191.67 hands over $46,000 and leaves $43,850 still owed — more than the original debt, after two decades of never missing a payment. Raise the income to $65,000 and the payment becomes $358.33, the balance falls from the first month, and it clears in about 13 years and 8 months without any write-off at all.
That first outcome has a name — negative amortisation — and it is a design feature rather than a fault. The scheme is protecting your cash flow now and accepting that the debt grows while it does so. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on what happens at the end of the term.
It is also why some schemes subsidise part of the unpaid interest, and why the same borrower can be better off on one scheme than another at identical incomes. This page does not model any interest subsidy; if yours has one, the balance it projects at the horizon will be too high.
Your income is held flat for the entire term here, and no career is flat. Real schemes make you recertify your income every year and recalculate the payment from the new figure, so a rising salary steadily converts a scheme payment into an ordinary one — and a fall in income does the reverse, which is the protection you are paying for.
The tax treatment of a written-off balance is separate law again, and in some systems the forgiven amount is treated as income in the year it is cancelled, arriving as a single large bill after twenty years of small ones. Marriage, joint filing and household size can all change the protected figure. None of that is arithmetic, and none of it is here.
Because the list would be wrong. Plan names, percentages and protected amounts are rewritten by legislatures and courts, sometimes mid-year, and a stale entry in a dropdown looks exactly as authoritative as a current one. Typing the numbers from your own paperwork is slower and correct.
It is common and it is expected when the payment is below the monthly interest charge. The scheme is capping what you pay, not what you are charged. The question worth answering is whether your income will rise enough to reverse it before the write-off date arrives.
Usually not. Money paid into a debt that was going to be cancelled anyway buys nothing, and it cannot be recovered afterwards. Overpaying makes sense only if you expect to clear the balance in full well before the horizon, which the projection on this page will tell you.
Treat one year as reliable and everything beyond it as a sketch. Your income changes, you recertify, and the scheme parameters themselves are amended. Re-run it whenever your pay changes or your servicer sends new figures, rather than trusting a projection made three years ago.