Debt-to-Income Ratio Calculator

This debt-to-income calculator shows what share of your gross income goes toward debt each month. Enter your income and your recurring payments to get your back-end DTI, your front-end (housing) DTI, the dollars you have left before the common 36% limit, and where you land on a safe-to-stressful scale. You can enter figures monthly or yearly, and the result updates as you type.

What a debt-to-income ratio is

Your debt-to-income ratio, or DTI, is your total monthly debt payments divided by your gross monthly income, written as a percentage. Gross income is the amount before taxes. If you earn $5,000 a month and pay $1,650 toward debt, your DTI is 33%. With no debt at all, it is 0%. The ratio works out the same whether you figure it monthly or yearly, since it is a proportion. Lenders lean on it because it captures, in one number, how stretched your budget already is.

Front-end and back-end DTI

There are two versions of the ratio. The front-end ratio, sometimes called the housing ratio, divides only your housing costs by gross income. Housing costs include rent or mortgage plus property tax, homeowners insurance, and any HOA or co-op fee. The back-end ratio adds everything else you owe each month, such as car loans, student loans, credit card minimums, and personal loans. The back-end number is what most people mean by debt-to-income, and it is the one lenders weigh most. This calculator shows both.

What lenders look for

In the U.S., mortgage lenders qualify buyers partly on these two ratios. For a conventional loan, the common guideline is 28/36: housing costs up to 28% of gross income and total debt up to 36%. FHA loans allow more room, often 31/43, and VA loans commonly use a single 41% figure. These are guidelines, not hard walls. A strong credit score, a large down payment, or healthy savings can push the limits higher, while a thin file can pull them lower. To see how your ratios affect the loan amount you could qualify for, use our House Affordability Calculator.

DTI and your financial health

Beyond loan approval, DTI is a quick read on your own budget. A ratio around one-third of income or less is generally comfortable. Once it climbs past half your income, it is usually a warning sign, because 50% or more of every paycheck is committed before you buy groceries or save a dollar. A lower ratio leaves room to handle a surprise expense, save for retirement, or take on a planned loan without strain.

DTI is not the same as credit utilization

DTI is often confused with credit utilization, sometimes called the debt-to-credit ratio. Utilization compares your credit card balances to your credit limits, and it feeds directly into your credit score; the higher it runs, the more it can drag the score down. DTI, by contrast, compares payments to income and does not appear on your credit report. Both matter, but they measure different things. To work on card balances, see our Credit Card Calculator.

How to lower your debt-to-income ratio

Two levers move the ratio: earn more or owe less.

• Raise your income. Overtime, a raise, a side job, or income from a hobby all shrink the ratio if your debt stays flat.
• Cut spending with a plan. A written budget shows where money leaks and frees up cash to pay debt down; our Budget Calculator can help you set targets.
• Make the debt cheaper. Ask a card issuer for a lower rate if you pay on time, or roll high-interest balances into one lower-rate loan; our Debt Consolidation Calculator shows what that could save.
• Avoid new debt while you work the number down, so a fresh balance does not erase your progress.

How this calculator figures your DTI

Enter each income source and each debt at the frequency that fits it, monthly or yearly, and the tool converts everything to a monthly basis before dividing. Housing items feed the front-end ratio; every debt feeds the back-end ratio. The result also shows how many dollars sit between your current payments and the 36% back-end limit, so you can see how much borrowing room is left. Because the math runs on gross income, use pre-tax figures for numbers a lender would recognize.

The 43% ceiling lenders no longer work to

For years the sharpest line in mortgage lending was 43%, the debt-to-income limit written into the federal qualified mortgage rule. That limit is gone. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau replaced it with a price-based test, and compliance became mandatory on 1 October 2022. A first-lien loan now takes safe harbor status when its APR sits no more than 1.5 percentage points above the average prime offer rate for a comparable transaction, whatever the borrower's ratio happens to be. Lenders still have to verify income and debts and consider the ratio, but the single number that used to decide the question no longer decides it.

What decides it now is the automated underwriting system. Fannie Mae's Selling Guide caps DTI at 50% for a loan run through Desktop Underwriter. The same guide holds a manually underwritten loan to 36%, and allows up to 45% when the credit score and reserves clear the eligibility matrix. The honest answer to "what ratio is allowed" is therefore somewhere between 36% and 50%, and the rest of the file decides where you land.

Which payments count, and which never do

Lenders count the required monthly payment, not the balance behind it. A card with $9,000 on it and a $180 minimum enters the ratio as $180. A few specific rules do most of the work in a real application:

• An installment loan with fewer than ten payments left can be left out, though Fannie Mae still lets a lender count it if the payment is large enough to strain the budget.
• A student loan in deferment is counted at 1% of the balance, or at a documented fully amortizing payment. A verified $0 payment under an income-driven plan can be used as $0.
• A debt assigned to someone else by court order, in a divorce for example, need not be counted, even when the creditor has not released you from liability.
• Living costs are never counted. Groceries, utilities, phone bills, childcare and health insurance premiums sit outside the ratio entirely.

That last rule surprises people. A $700 childcare bill appears nowhere in the ratio while a $180 card minimum does, because DTI measures obligations to creditors rather than the cost of running a household. VA lending is the exception, and its second test is residual income: what is left each month after tax, housing and debt, measured against a published minimum for your region and household size. Once the ratio passes 41%, the VA requires that residual figure to be 20% higher than the table would otherwise ask.

What households actually pay

The Federal Reserve publishes the national version of this ratio every quarter, measured against disposable income rather than gross income. In the first quarter of 2026 households spent 11.16% of disposable income on debt payments, of which mortgages accounted for 5.88 points. The series reached 15.85% at the end of 2007 and fell to 9.05% in early 2021, when rates were low and balances had been paid down.

Those figures are not comparable to your own result, since they use after-tax income and average across every household including the ones with no debt at all. What they do show is the direction of travel, and how much room the average household has kept between its payments and its paycheck.