FD Calculator

Watch Your Deposit Grow, Year by Year

Each row shows the closing balance and how much interest that year added. The stacked bars split every year’s value into your original deposit (purple) and the interest earned so far (green).

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How It Works — 3 Simple Steps

The formula behind it

Where P is your deposit, r is the annual rate as a decimal, n is compounding periods per year, and t is the tenure in years.

Worked example

Go Deeper on Fixed Deposits

How FD Interest Is Calculated, Step by Step

Every FD interest calculator runs the same one formula — the one in How It Works above — but the number only really lands when you watch it move. So here is this fixed deposit calculator’s own default deposit, $100,000 at 7% compounded quarterly, walked through its first year one quarter at a time. Each quarter the bank works out 7% ÷ 4 = 1.75% of the current balance and adds it on:

The first year of the default deposit. The four quarters add to $7,185.90 of interest — exactly the Year 1 row of the calculator’s own year-by-year table above.

Notice the pattern: the interest itself grows every quarter, because each quarter’s interest is calculated on a balance that already includes the previous quarters’ interest. That is compounding, and it is the whole engine of an FD. Run the same twenty quarterly steps out to five years and the balance reaches $141,477.82 — $41,477.82 of interest on a $100,000 deposit. To calculate FD interest by hand for any deposit, the recipe never changes: divide the annual rate by the number of compounding periods, apply it to the running balance, repeat for every period in the tenure. That loop is all an interest calculator for FD money ever does.

Simple interest vs compound interest

Some deposits — and most quick mental estimates — use simple interest instead: interest = deposit × rate × years, with no interest on interest. On the same $100,000 at 7% for 5 years, simple interest is $100,000 × 7% × 5 = $35,000, for a maturity value of $135,000. The compounded FD pays $41,477.82. The $6,477.82 difference is purely interest earned on interest, and it grows faster than the tenure does: double the tenure and the compounding gap much more than doubles. This is why an interest calculator on FD money must compound — a simple-interest estimate always understates a real FD.

What this calculator assumes

Three conventions, stated plainly. First, tenure runs exactly as you enter it: whole years as years, months at 12 to the year, and exact days — for special tenures such as 444 days — at 365 to the year (banks count exact days too, so a day or two either side of a standard tenure can differ by a few dollars). Second, the rate is the quoted annual rate, split evenly across the compounding periods — the standard convention behind every fixed deposit interest calculator. Third, the headline result is before tax, fees and any premature-withdrawal adjustment — enter your marginal tax rate under Advanced options and the after-tax figures appear alongside it; the sections below take up tax, fees and early breaking one at a time.

FD Interest Rates: What Decides the Rate You Are Offered

There is no single FD interest rate. Every bank publishes its own rate card — a grid of rates by tenure and deposit size — and reprices it whenever its costs change. When people search for bank FD interest rates, that card — one bank’s fixed deposit interest rates at one moment — is what they are looking for. A bank FD calculator on the bank’s own site simply runs the formula from How It Works against that one bank’s card. Four things decide the number on it.

The central bank sets the weather

Bank FD rates follow the central bank’s policy rate, with a lag. In India, the Reserve Bank of India raised its repo rate to 5.50% on 7 October 2026 (from 5.25%); US term-deposit rates move the same way with the Federal Reserve’s target range. The transmission is mechanical: when the policy rate rises, banks can charge more on new loans, so they can pay more for deposits — and new and renewing FDs are repriced, typically over the following weeks. An FD already booked never changes: the rate printed at booking is the rate you are paid at maturity, whichever way the weather turns. That guarantee is the product.

What banks actually pay, in aggregate

Because individual cards change constantly, the honest way to show bank FD rates on a page like this is the official aggregate. In the US, the FDIC publishes the average rate paid by every insured institution each month:

FDIC national rates as of 19 October 2026 (FDIC.gov). A CD is the US name for the same term deposit this page calls an FD. Averages cover every insured bank and credit union, including the big banks that pay the least — competitive and online banks pay noticeably more, which is exactly why the average is a floor for shopping, not a quote.

Tenure, size and senior-citizen premiums

Within one bank’s card, longer tenures usually carry higher rates — the bank is renting your money for longer — though the curve can flatten when banks expect policy rates to fall. Large deposits sometimes unlock a better tier. And at many Indian banks, senior citizens are offered a premium on the standard fixed deposit interest rate, typically a quarter to half a percentage point (0.25–0.50%), set by each bank’s own card. None of these premiums is a rule; all of them are worth one question before you book.

One more card pattern worth recognising: the special-tenure deposit. Banks periodically market an FD for an exact, odd day count — 444 days is a recurring favourite in India — carrying a small premium over the nearest standard tenure. The premium is real but usually measured in hundredths of a point, and the odd tenure is the point: it lands the maturity on the bank’s chosen date, not yours. Price a special-tenure offer the same way as any other — convert it to effective annual yield (the section below shows how) and check the maturity date against when you actually need the money — rather than by the headline rate alone.

Why there is no bank rate table on this page

Deliberately: a printed table of bank FD rates would be wrong most of the time. Card rates are marketing, revised irregularly through the year — the 2026 and 2025 versions of the same bank’s table are different documents. So this page does the durable part instead: it explains what moves the interest rate on FD cards, shows the official averages for scale, and leaves the live number where it belongs — on your bank’s current card. An FD interest rates calculator can only ever be as current as the rate you feed it. Take that rate, enter it in this free online FD calculator — or any FD rate calculator you trust — and the maturity figure you get is exact for the rate you were actually quoted.

What Your Deposit Grows To: Maturity Values by Rate and Tenure

The maturity value is the number every FD return calculator exists to produce: deposit plus all compounded interest, on the day the tenure ends. The two grids below are computed with this page’s own formula — quarterly compounding throughout — so you can read a figure straight off, then confirm it in the FD calculator online above with your exact deposit.

$25,000 deposited for 5 years, compounded quarterly. Each extra point of rate adds more than the point before it — the 7%-to-8% step adds $1,779.23 of interest, the 4%-to-5% step $1,546.18 — because a higher rate compounds on itself too.

$25,000 at 6.5%, compounded quarterly. By year 10 the interest ($22,638.97) is close to the original deposit itself — time, not rate, does the heavy lifting in the second half of a long FD.

Which lever is bigger — rate or tenure? From the two grids: on $25,000, lifting the rate from 6% to 7% for the same 5 years adds $1,698.07 of interest. Holding 6.5% and stretching the tenure from 5 years to 10 adds $13,128.48. Tenure is the stronger lever by a wide margin, because it hands compounding more periods to work on — which is also why locking a long tenure at a poor rate is the most expensive FD mistake: the weak rate gets a decade to underperform.

Two reading habits worth keeping. First, the FD maturity calculator above draws this same growth year by year for your own numbers, including the bars that split each year’s balance into your deposit and the interest so far. Second, an FD return rate quoted as a single percentage is only comparable once compounding is counted — that adjusted rate is the effective annual yield, and it gets its own section below.

Monthly Interest FDs: Taking the Interest as Income

Most FDs are cumulative: interest stays inside the deposit, compounds, and is paid with the principal at maturity. A monthly interest FD flips that — the bank pays the interest out to your savings account every month and returns the principal untouched at the end. It is the same deposit with the income switched on, which is why the FD calculator monthly interest question is really a question about payout, not about a different product.

The monthly figure is, to a close approximation, the year’s interest divided by twelve:

One honest caveat, because an FD monthly interest calculator that hides it flatters the product: many banks compute monthly payouts on a discounted basis. Interest paid to you in month one cannot stay and compound to the quarter’s end, so the bank pays slightly less than the straight division above — the difference is small, but the bank’s own payout quote, not any calculator, is the binding number. Treat the figures here as the ceiling the quote is measured against.

Payout frequency is a smaller choice inside the same one. Many banks offer quarterly, half-yearly or annual payouts as well as monthly ones. The less often interest is paid out, the less it is discounted — interest that stays until its quarter ends is worth slightly more than the same interest dripped out monthly — so a quarterly payout of the same FD is usually a touch larger in total than twelve monthly ones. The differences are small next to the cumulative-versus-payout decision itself, but if you are taking income anyway, the payout rhythm is worth one look at the bank’s quote.

The real cost of the payout version is the compounding you give up. The default deposit paid cumulatively earns $41,477.82 over five years; paid out monthly at the same 7%, it pays $7,000 a year — $35,000 in total — because none of the paid-out interest ever earns interest itself. Monthly payouts suit money whose job is income (a retiree topping up a pension, a known monthly bill). If the money’s job is growth, cumulative wins by exactly that compounding gap, and the gap widens with every year of tenure.

Effective Annual Yield: Compare Two FDs Fairly

Two FDs can quote the same rate and pay different amounts, because the quoted (nominal) rate ignores how often interest is compounded. The effective annual yield fixes that: it is the FD rate of interest you actually earn over a year, compounding included.

Watch it work on one deposit — $50,000 at a quoted 6% for 5 years, with only the compounding frequency changing:

Same deposit, same quoted rate, same tenure. Monthly compounding pays $531.23 more than annual compounding over the five years — the entire difference is the frequency.

At the common quarterly convention, quoted rates convert to effective yields like this: 4% → 4.06%, 5% → 5.09%, 6% → 6.14%, 7% → 7.19%, 8% → 8.24%. That conversion is the fair comparison an FD interest rates calculator should leave you with — because it reverses naive rankings. A 6% FD compounded monthly (6.17% effective) beats a 6.1% FD compounded annually (6.10% effective), even though its headline rate is lower. Whenever two offers differ in either rate or frequency, convert both to effective yield before choosing; this fixed deposit interest rate calculator’s frequency menu lets you verify any pair in seconds — and any FD interest rate calculator that shows only the nominal rate is showing you half the offer.

Breaking an FD Early, Borrowing Against It, and Laddering

What breaking an FD early really costs

Banks let you close an FD before maturity, but the interest is recalculated from scratch: you are paid at the rate for the tenure you actually completed, minus a penalty — commonly around 1 percentage point, as the FAQ below notes. On a real-sized example, with every figure computed by this page’s formula:

Two softer landings exist at many banks. Partial withdrawal lets you break only the portion you need where the bank offers it, and sweep-in accounts link a savings account to FDs that break automatically, in small units, only when a payment actually needs the money. Both keep the rest of the deposit compounding at its booked rate.

The loan against FD: borrow instead of breaking

Most banks will lend against a running FD — typically up to about 90% of its value — at a rate set a small margin above the FD’s own rate (commonly 1–2 percentage points). The loan against FD interest rate therefore moves with your deposit, not with the bank’s general lending rates. On the $40,000 deposit above, a 90% loan is $36,000; one year of it at 8% (the 7% FD rate + 1) costs $2,880 of simple interest, or $3,240 at 9% (+ 2). Meanwhile the FD itself is untouched and keeps compounding toward its full $56,591.13. For a short, certain need, borrowing against the FD is often cheaper than breaking it — run both sets of numbers before choosing, because the break-even depends on how long you need the money.

Laddering: never have all of it locked at once

The structural answer to both problems is to split a lump sum across staggered maturities — an FD ladder. One rung matures every year, so cash frees up on a schedule instead of by penalty, and each maturing rung is reinvested at whatever rate then rules. In brief, on $50,000 split into five $10,000 rungs at illustrative rates of 5.50% to 6.50%: the ladder earns $10,346.84 of interest as its rungs mature, against $19,020.99 for the whole sum locked for 5 years at 6.50% — the ladder deliberately earns less, and what it buys with the difference is a maturity, and a fresh rate decision, every single year. The full worked ladder, priced rung by rung, is in the FD laddering guide linked at the end of this page.

Tax on FD Interest, in Brief

FD interest is taxable income in both of this page’s anchor countries; only the mechanics differ. In the United States, interest on a term deposit is taxed as ordinary income in the year it is credited to you — and on multi-year CDs the IRS generally treats interest as credited annually even when the bank pays it at maturity, so the tax can arrive before the cash does. State income tax may apply on top.

In India, FD interest is taxed at your income-tax slab rate. Banks deduct tax at source (TDS) under Section 194A once the interest they pay you in a financial year crosses a threshold — since 1 April 2025, under the Finance Act 2025, that threshold is ₹50,000, or ₹1,00,000 for senior citizens (amounts in rupees, as the law states them). TDS is advance tax credited against your final bill, not an extra charge; if your total income falls below the taxable limit, Form 15G (or 15H for senior citizens) tells the bank not to deduct it.

One last number belongs in every FD decision, tax included: the real return. An FD’s quoted rate is nominal; what your money gains in purchasing power is roughly the nominal rate minus inflation over the same period. A 6% FD in a year of 4% inflation earns about 2% in real terms — and tax on the full 6% of nominal interest trims that further, which is why the after-tax, after-inflation figure, not the headline rate, is the honest measure of what a deposit did for you.

Tax rules are revised often and the right treatment depends on your own position — this section is the map, not advice, and the disclaimer at the foot of the page applies.

NRI fixed deposits: NRE, NRO and FCNR in brief

Non-resident Indians do not hold one kind of fixed deposit. The account the deposit sits in decides the currency, whether the money can leave India, and how the interest is taxed — three choices that matter more than the rate.

NRE (Non-Resident External) deposits are for income earned outside India, held in rupees. The principal and the interest are generally repatriable — they can be moved out of India — and the interest is generally exempt from Indian income tax. That combination is the point of the account: foreign earnings, kept in rupees, without Indian tax on the interest and without a repatriation barrier. NRO (Non-Resident Ordinary) deposits are for income earned in India — rent, dividends, pension — also held in rupees. The interest is taxable in India, with tax deducted at source, and repatriation is subject to limits and documentation. The same bank, the same tenure, and the same headline rate can therefore produce different after-tax, after-repatriation outcomes depending only on which account holds the deposit, which is why the account choice should come before the rate comparison, not after it.

FCNR (Foreign Currency Non-Resident) deposits remove the currency question entirely: the deposit is held in a permitted foreign currency, so there is no rupee exchange risk on the principal while it is on deposit. The trade is availability — fewer tenures and currencies are offered than for rupee deposits — and the interest is generally exempt from Indian income tax, as with NRE deposits. For money that must stay in its original currency, FCNR is the natural home; for money that will be spent in rupees, the conversion happens at deposit or at maturity either way, and the rate comparison should be made after conversion costs, not before. No bank rate, tenure, or return figure is stated here: enter the rate and tenure you are offered into the calculator above, in the currency the deposit is actually held in, and the maturity math is the same in every case. Account eligibility, repatriation limits, and tax treatment change with regulation — confirm the current position with the bank and a tax adviser before opening or renewing.

Excel check. The maturity formula above reproduces in one cell: =FV(6%, 5, 0, -10000) returns $13,382.26 for $10,000 at 6% compounded annually for 5 years, matching the calculator’s maturity figure for the same inputs. For monthly compounding, divide the rate by 12 and multiply the periods by 12: =FV(6%/12, 60, 0, -10000). The sign convention is the same as everywhere on this site: the deposit is negative because it leaves your pocket, and the result is the positive maturity value.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Guides

Four guides that take fixed deposits further — the monthly-income version, the CD comparison, the real cost of breaking early, and the ladder that avoids breaking at all.

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