The card companies have a vested interest in not clearing the balance each month. They hope that the credit holder will not repay everything he/she owes so that they can charge an interest on the borrowed money. Though Credit card companies are also good at building in additional charges for things like late payments or going over the credit limit but there are lots of ways of getting more money if the card holder does not understand and follow the rules carefully.
In the UK one will see the term APR used in all credit card advertisements. APR stands for Annual Percentage Rate and is the rate of interest that one would need to pay on any debt using the card over the course of a year. Placing the APR on information about credit cards is a requirement of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 and it allows people to understand the longer term impact of the interest rates to enable fair comparisons between different cards. Tough it is difficult to compare the deals offered by several cards if one used monthly interest rates or may be annual.
All credit cards have a minimum payment amount, which is the least one must pay each month and this is generally about 2 - 5% of the balance. As this is such a small proportion of the debt, one will take an awful long time to pay it off if all the cardholder does is make the minimum payments. It is always better to Remember the longer he/she take to pay back the debt, the more the card company will get from the holder in interest charges.