RATE Function

The RATE function calculates the interest rate per payment period.

This function works in much the same way as the RATE(nper, pmt, pv, fv, type, guess) function does in Mircosoft Excel. For more information on that function you can see the Microsoft Office help for RATE.

Providing the term, payment amount, and future value, this function returns the interest rate for a loan.

RATE is one of Author's financial expressions and can be used in calculating savings, loans or investment values.

Function name	RATE
Usage model	RATE ( term:NUM, payment:NUM, present value:NUM, future value:NUM, type:NUM )
Parameters	This function requires you to replace three of five parameters (two are optional):
term: NUM	The function uses this value as the total number of payment periods.
payment: NUM	The function uses this value as the paid amount in each payment period.
present value: NUM	This value represents the current value of the future amount; the default is zero.
future value: NUM	(Optional) This represents the value after the last payment period, the default is zero.
type: NUM	(Optional) This value can be entered as a 0 or a 1, 0 meaning payments are due at the end of a payment period and 1 meaning payments are due at the beginning of a payment period. The default is zero.
Result	A number value.

Example

For example, if you are paying $100 a month over 3 years and you know that the future value is $4,023.1381682 then you can work out the rate by using the following figures:

term: 36
payment: -100
present value: 0
future value: 4,023.1381682
type: 0

The following script would return 0.00625:

RATE ( 36, -100, 0, 4023.1381682, 0)