What an amortization schedule is
An amortization schedule is simply your loan broken into one row per month, showing exactly how each EMI payment splits between interest and principal, and what you’d still owe after that payment. LoanTools generates one automatically for any loan amount, rate, and tenure you enter.
The five columns, explained
- Month — which installment number this row represents, from 1 to your total tenure in months.
- EMI — the fixed amount you pay that month. This stays the same every month (the very last month can differ by a few rupees — see “why the last row looks slightly different” below).
- Interest — the portion of that month’s EMI that goes toward interest, calculated on whatever balance you still owed at the start of that month.
- Principal — the portion that actually reduces your loan balance: EMI minus interest.
- Balance — what you’d still owe immediately after that month’s payment. This reaches exactly ₹0 on the final row.
Why the split shifts every month
Take a ₹6,00,000 loan at 10% for 48 months as an example. In month 1, interest is calculated on the full ₹6,00,000, so ₹5,000 of that first EMI is interest and only ₹10,218 reduces the balance. By month 12, the balance has already dropped, so interest is down to ₹4,023 and principal is up to ₹11,194. By the halfway point (month 24), interest is ₹2,851 versus ₹12,366 in principal. By the final month, almost the entire EMI — ₹15,092 out of ₹15,218 — is principal, with just ₹126 in interest.
This is the defining feature of reducing-balance loans: because interest is charged only on what’s still outstanding, and the outstanding balance keeps falling, the interest portion of your EMI naturally shrinks over the loan’s life while the principal portion grows — even though the EMI amount itself doesn’t change.
Why the last row looks slightly different
Every value in a schedule is rounded to the nearest paisa as it’s calculated. Rounding hundreds of numbers independently can leave a stray paisa unaccounted for by the end — so the final month is deliberately adjusted to close the balance to exactly ₹0, rather than ₹0.03 or −₹0.01. This can make the very last EMI a few rupees higher or lower than every other month. That’s expected behavior, not an error — see our methodology page for the full explanation.
What the schedule is useful for
- Seeing how much of your loan you’d still owe at any point in the future, not just at the end.
- Understanding why interest paid in year 1 is much higher than interest paid in the loan’s final year.
- Comparing how the schedule changes if you adjust the tenure — see how in our tenure comparison guide.
- Cross-checking your lender’s own repayment schedule against an independent calculation.
LoanTools groups long schedules by year so a 20 or 30-year loan’s hundreds of rows stay easy to scan — try it with your own numbers on the calculator.