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I have a credit card. I used it to make a few payments. In my account, I see:

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If I want to avoid paying any interest or late fees, do I have to pay the current balance or the remaining statement balance?

If that's of any help, here is the details for the current balance:

enter image description here

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  • One difference between the linked question and my question is that in my question, I wasn't sure whether to pay the current balance or the remaining statement balance. This is not addressed directly in the linked question.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Nov 8, 2023 at 3:16
  • The accepted answer there talks about exactly that.
    – littleadv
    Commented Nov 8, 2023 at 4:50
  • @littleadv It doesn't explain the difference between "current balance" and "statement balance".
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Nov 8, 2023 at 4:59
  • Note that my question was originally titled "If I want to avoid paying any interest or late fees on my Amazon Visa Card, do I have to pay the current balance or the remaining statement balance?", before someone edited it. The original title was making it clear that the question focuses on current balance vs. remaining statement balance
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Nov 8, 2023 at 5:24

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To avoid interest, you must have payments that total up to at least the prior statement balance prior to the due date (with possibly some grace period of a few days). The rest of your "current balance" consists of transactions made after the statement end date, and will be on the next statement.

Credits often count towards the required payment too, but they might not count if they are reversals of charges in the same statement (e.g. you probably can't charge $2,000, have the merchant reverse it, and have it count as a "payment"). Whether a credit counts towards the prior balance is likely outlined in the terms and conditions. To be safe, I would always pay at least the statement balance ($1,861.44 in your example) and not rely on credits counting towards that.

My accounts are set to auto-pay the "statement balance", and they always pay the prior statement balance less any cash back awards.

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  • Note: There are cards which begin charging interest from the day of the transaction, though they are rare last-resort-short-of-prepaid offerings. And cash withdrawals behave that way on most cards. Always read the exact terms of the card you are considering before signing up, or at least when you get the full legalese with the card; the details matter and you may decide you want a different card after all, or need to change how you plan to use that card.
    – keshlam
    Commented Nov 8, 2023 at 16:01

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