Does Capital One Do Personal Loans?

Capital One closed its acquisition of Discover on May 18, 2025. According to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Discover merged into Capital One, and Discover Bank merged into Capital One, N.A. In practice, Discover now operates as a division of Capital One’s national bank. The Discover name lives on for credit cards and personal loans, while other Discover products are being folded into Capital One.

That folding-in has been visible all year. Discover stopped opening new savings, checking, CD and money market accounts in early 2026. Existing Discover savings accounts began converting to Capital One 360 Performance Savings in late August, with new routing numbers. Discover credit card accounts started moving to Capital One’s website and app in waves beginning in late July. Through all of that, Discover personal loans have stayed open to new applicants.

The 660 score and $25,000 income floors are only the entry ticket. Like most lenders, Discover weighs your debt-to-income ratio, meaning your monthly debt payments divided by your gross monthly income, along with your recent credit behavior. Someone with a 700 score who carries heavy card balances and several new accounts can get a worse offer, or a decline, than someone at 670 with a lighter load. Recent late payments, a bankruptcy, or a pile of hard inquiries in the past few months all weigh on the decision.

Income verification is real, not a formality. Expect to upload recent pay stubs, or tax returns and bank statements if you’re self-employed. Retirement income, Social Security and a spouse’s income can count toward the household threshold if you can document them. Gaps between what you entered and what the documents show are one of the most common reasons an approval stalls, so use your actual gross income, not an estimate.

If you’re on the edge, small changes help. Paying a credit card balance down before applying can lower both your utilization and your debt-to-income ratio. Asking for a smaller amount or choosing a longer term lowers the payment the lender is weighing, though a longer term costs more interest, as the chart below shows.

Checking your rate doesn’t affect your score. Submitting the full application adds a hard inquiry, which usually costs a few points and fades within a year. Once the loan funds, a new installment account appears on your reports, which can briefly lower your average account age.

The bigger effect, for debt consolidation, tends to be positive. When a personal loan pays off credit card balances, your revolving utilization falls, and utilization weighs heavily in most scoring models. Many borrowers see their scores rise within a couple of months of consolidating, as long as the paid-off cards stay at or near zero. The risk is behavioral: if the cards fill back up, you end up with the loan payment and the card balances, which is worse than where you started.

Two features stand out once you compare it with the rest of the market. The first is the price ceiling. Many online personal lenders top out near 36% APR and also take an origination fee of several percent off the loan. Discover tops out under 25% and takes nothing off the top. For a borrower with decent but not perfect credit, that combination can beat lenders that advertise a lower starting rate.

The second is the 30-day return policy. If you return the full loan amount within 30 days of funding, you pay no interest. That’s genuinely unusual, and useful if a home repair estimate comes in lower than expected or you get an insurance check. The rules differ when the money went straight to your creditors, so read that section of the agreement if you’re using direct payment.

The weaknesses are just as clear. The 660 credit score floor shuts out anyone with fair credit. The $40,000 cap is low for a large renovation. There’s no cosigner option for someone who needs help qualifying. And the shortest term is 36 months, though with no prepayment penalty you can always finish sooner.

We found the Capital One restriction to be the single most important detail for the people most likely to search this question. Many of them hold a Capital One card with a balance and assume the company’s new personal loan is the natural way to refinance it. Current disclosures say the loan can’t be used to pay Capital One accounts directly, including Capital One and Discover credit cards, and Discover has long barred using its loans to pay off Discover cards. If the debt you want to consolidate is on a Capital One or Discover card, plan on a different tool.

The car and education exclusions are easier to work around because better products exist. Auto loans are secured by the car and usually cheaper than a personal loan; Capital One’s own auto lending is built for this. For school, federal student loans carry fixed rates, income-based repayment and forgiveness options that no personal loan offers.

The defaults use the Federal Reserve’s August averages: $15,000 moved from a 22.36% card to an 11.90% loan over 60 months. The loan payment is about $333 a month, with roughly $4,975 in interest. Paying that same $333 a month on the card instead takes about 100 months and costs close to $18,000 in interest, so the loan saves around $13,000. Try entering an 8% origination fee to see why Discover’s no-fee pricing matters: you’d have to borrow about $16,300 to clear the same $15,000.

For card debt specifically, a balance transfer card is the closest in-house substitute. Several Capital One cards have offered introductory 0% APR periods on balance transfers in exchange for a transfer fee, usually a few percent of the amount moved. Two cautions apply. Capital One generally doesn’t let you transfer a balance from one Capital One card to another, so this helps with debt at other banks, not with debt already at Capital One. And the promotional rate ends; whatever is left jumps to the card’s regular APR, which for most cards is above 20%.

That leaves a common gap: someone carrying a Capital One card balance who wants a fixed-rate loan. For that person, the answer is usually outside the Capital One family entirely, at a credit union or another bank or online lender whose loans can pay off any creditor. Shop with prequalification tools that use a soft pull, and compare the APR, which includes fees, not just the interest rate.

A 0% balance transfer looks unbeatable until you check whether you can actually clear the balance before the promotion ends. When we worked through a typical case, the answer depended almost entirely on the monthly payment the borrower could afford. Moving $15,000 onto a card with a 3% transfer fee costs $450 upfront. To pay off $15,450 within a 15-month promotional period, you’d need to pay about $1,030 a month. Someone who can do that pays only the fee, which beats any personal loan.

Someone who can only manage $333 a month is in a very different spot. After 15 months they’d still owe roughly $10,450, now at the card’s regular rate, which is often above 20%. At that payment, the fixed 60-month personal loan at 11.90% from our calculator finishes on schedule with about $4,975 in interest and no rate jump waiting at the end. The rule of thumb we came away with: if your realistic payment clears the balance inside the promo window, take the transfer; if it doesn’t, the fixed loan usually wins.

There’s also a credit wrinkle. A new card adds a revolving limit, and moving a large balance onto it can push that card’s utilization high, which weighs on your score until it’s paid down. A personal loan moves the debt into an installment account instead, which scoring models treat more gently.

Discover’s personal loan support is staffed seven days a week: 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. Its customer service is U.S.-based, which reviewers consistently note as a strength. If a problem goes unresolved, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accepts complaints about personal loans and usually gets a company response within a few weeks.