The Question Every Other Calculator Makes You Ask Twice
When you part-pay a home loan, the lender asks whether you want the tenure reduced or the EMI reduced. Almost every prepayment calculator makes that a toggle: you run it one way, write the answer down, run it the other way, then compare. This one computes both from the same figures and shows them together, because the comparison is the entire decision.
Tenure Down or EMI Down?
Reducing the tenure keeps your instalment where it is and ends the loan sooner. Reducing the EMI keeps the loan running to its original last month but lowers what you pay each month. Shortening the tenure always saves more interest — often several times more — because interest accrues on the balance for fewer months. Choosing the lower EMI is not irrational, though: it buys monthly breathing room, which is the right answer if your cash flow is stretched or your income is uncertain. Either way the choice is worth making with the numbers in front of you, and the two figures above are there for exactly that.
Prepay Early — the Timing Matters More Than the Amount
A home loan is front-loaded: in the first years almost all of your EMI is interest and very little is principal. A prepayment made in year two therefore removes interest that would have accrued for the next eighteen years, while the same amount paid in year fifteen removes very little. If you can only prepay once, doing it early is worth far more than doing it big.
A Bonus Every Year, Not One Lump Sum
The realistic pattern is not a single windfall — it is an annual bonus, part of which goes into the loan every year. This calculator takes up to three prepayments and lets any of them repeat every six or twelve months, so you can model what you actually intend to do and watch the tenure collapse year by year. Each prepayment is applied at the end of the month you name, after that month's instalment, which is the order a lender books it and the order that determines the interest it truly saves.
What Your Lender May Charge
On a floating-rate home loan to an individual borrower, banks and NBFCs have not been permitted to levy foreclosure or prepayment charges since RBI's 2012 circular, which was extended in 2014 to all floating-rate term loans to individual borrowers. The RBI (Pre-payment Charges on Loans) Directions, 2025 — issued on 2 July 2025 and effective from 1 January 2026 — consolidate and widen that position, but they apply only to loans sanctioned or renewed on or after that date, so most loans running today are still governed by the earlier regime. Fixed-rate loans are not covered either way: there, charges remain permissible under the lender's board-approved policy. Read your sanction letter before you transfer the money, and ask for a revised amortisation schedule in writing afterwards.
Prepay or Invest?
Prepaying earns you a guaranteed, tax-free return equal to your loan rate — around 8.5% at current pricing. Beating that reliably after tax is harder than it sounds, which is the case for prepaying. The case against is liquidity: money put into a home loan is very difficult to get back out. If you claim a deduction on home-loan interest under the old tax regime, your effective loan cost is lower than the headline rate and the comparison narrows; under the new regime there is no such deduction on a self-occupied property, and prepaying looks better. The home loan EMI calculator shows the loan as it stands today, and the income tax calculator shows which regime you are actually in.