How much would my Chapter 13 payment be?

What must be paid through the plan

Some things have to be paid in full during the plan, and they form the base of the payment:

• Secured arrears you’re curing. If the plan is saving your house, the missed mortgage payments (plus the lender’s allowable fees) get spread across the plan months.
• Car loans being paid through the plan, at whatever treatment the plan gives them.
• Priority debts: recent taxes and any support arrears, which must be paid in full.
• Trustee and attorney fees. The trustee takes a percentage of what flows through the plan, and most attorney fees in Chapter 13 are paid through the plan rather than up front, which is why many people can get into a Chapter 13 with little money down.

Add those up, divide by the plan months, and you have the floor of your payment before unsecured creditors get anything.

What determines the rest

On top of the base, the law asks what you can afford: your disposable income, meaning income minus reasonable expenses for your household. If your income is below your state’s median, the plan is usually three years and the budget analysis is fairly commonsense. Above median, the plan is five years and the means test’s expense standards get involved. Whatever disposable income the numbers show is what unsecured creditors receive, whether that turns out to be 100%, 10%, or nearly nothing.

One more floor: unsecured creditors must receive at least what they’d have gotten in a Chapter 7. If you own significant property that isn’t exempt, that value sets a minimum for the plan. This is exactly how Chapter 13 lets people keep non-exempt assets: you’re paying the asset’s value over time instead of surrendering it.

Why two families with the same debt pay differently

A $30,000 credit card balance might cost one filer $150 a month in a plan and another $900, because one is below median with no arrears and the other is above median curing a mortgage. The debt matters less than the arrears, the taxes, the income, and the household. This is why online “Chapter 13 calculators” are mostly noise, and why the number a lawyer quotes after seeing your pay stubs and bills is worth more than anything a website tells you, including this one.

The negotiation nobody mentions

Your proposed budget is not automatically accepted. The trustee’s job includes pushing plan payments up; your attorney’s job includes defending every legitimate expense to keep the payment realistic. Confirmation is a negotiation, and it’s the part of Chapter 13 where having an experienced attorney most obviously pays for itself. A plan that’s $100 a month too high doesn’t fail in month one; it fails in month twenty when the transmission goes. The right payment is the one you can actually finish.

The bottom line

Expect the payment to be built from: arrears and taxes you’re catching up, plus fees, plus whatever your honest budget shows you can spare. The Checkup can’t compute your plan, but it can tell you whether your situation looks like a Chapter 13 situation at all, and the reading list it gives you will make the eventual attorney conversation faster and cheaper.