Covenant Headroom
Calculator
Enter a borrower's numbers and covenant thresholds. See how much cushion sits under each covenant, and which one bites first if earnings slip. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
The borrower
The covenants
Headroom
Headroom is read as the drop in EBITDA that would take each ratio to its limit, holding debt flat. A tight reading (under 15 percent) is the one to watch between reporting dates.
This models the three maintenance covenants most private credit agreements test. Your credit agreement governs the exact definitions, and many use adjusted or pro forma EBITDA with add-backs and cure rights. Treat this as a fast read, not a compliance certificate.
The tightest covenant is the one that matters
A borrower can look healthy on leverage and still be one soft quarter away from tripping interest coverage. The headline number on a credit is rarely the binding one. The covenant with the least room is what governs a waiver conversation, a repricing, or a workout, so that is the figure a monitoring team should carry into every review.
The math here is simple on purpose. Leverage breaches when EBITDA falls far enough that net debt divided by EBITDA reaches the cap. Coverage breaches when EBITDA falls to the multiple of interest, or of interest plus amortization, that the agreement sets as the floor. The cushion is the gap between today and that point. What is not simple, at scale, is doing this for every borrower, every reporting period, against the exact definitions each agreement wrote down.
That is the work AI covenant monitoring takes off the desk. It reads the credit agreement, extracts each covenant and its precise definition, pulls the figures from the borrower's reporting, runs the tests, and flags the ones getting tight, so the credit officer spends the time on the calls that matter rather than on the arithmetic. We wrote the step by step version in how to set up AI covenant monitoring, and the broader menu in the best AI tools for private credit. The figures stay tied to their source, and a person still owns every call.
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Covenant testing across the whole book, every reporting period.
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