Mortgage vs. Refinance Calculator

A refinance doesn't change your house or your debt — it replaces the loan against them. You take out a new mortgage, use it to pay off the old one, and from then on you owe the new lender at the new rate and term. Everything that follows flows from that one swap: a lower rate cuts the interest portion of every payment, a fresh term resets how long you'll be paying, and the closing costs are the price of admission.

That reset term is the part people miss. Refinancing a loan with 27 years left into a new 30-year mortgage can lower the payment even at the same rate, simply by stretching the balance over more years — which feels like a saving but can quietly add interest. A rate cut has to be big enough to overcome that. The tool above shows both effects at once: the monthly payment tells you the short-term relief, the lifetime-interest figure tells you the real cost.

The standalone refinance calculator goes deeper on a single refinance — full amortization schedule and break-even detail. This page is the decision framing: keep what you have, or make the swap.

Take a $320,000 balance at 7% with 27 years left to run. That payment is $2,201 a month, with about $393,000 of interest still ahead of you. Refinancing to 5.75% over a fresh 30 years drops the payment to $1,867 — a saving of $334 a month.

At $6,000 in closing costs, that monthly saving pays the refinance back in 18 months. And here the rate cut is large enough to win on the long game too: total interest falls to about $352,000, roughly $41,000 lessover the life of the loan, despite adding three years back onto the term. Shrink the rate gap — say 7% to 6.5% — and that lifetime figure can flip to a loss even while the monthly payment still drops. That's the trade the two numbers are there to expose.

Refinancing tends to make sensewhen the rate drop is meaningful, you plan to stay in the home well past the break-even month, and you can cover the closing costs without rolling them into the balance. The longer you'll hold the loan after break-even, the more the monthly saving compounds into real money.

Keeping your current mortgage tends to make sensewhen the rate improvement is small, you might sell or move before break-even, or you're well into the loan and refinancing to a fresh long term would reset your progress on principal. If the goal is simply to pay less interest, making extra principal payments on your existing loan — see the mortgage payoff calculator — avoids closing costs entirely.

None of this is advice about your specific situation — rates, fees, and how long you'll stay are yours to weigh. The tool is here to make the trade-off visible, not to make the call.