Past Tense of “repay”
The past tense of repay is repaid; the past participle is repaid.
Why “repay” behaves this way
"Repay" combines "re-" with "pay," whose irregular past form "paid" is a spelling adjustment from an otherwise regular "payed," reflecting a pronunciation shift where the "ay" sound shortened before the added "-d" — a pattern shared with "say/said" and "lay/laid." "Repay" inherits this spelling shift directly, and the compound has meant "to pay back" — both financially and, figuratively, in terms of favors, kindness, or debts of gratitude — since Middle English. Microfinance and community-lending programs in many countries have built entire models around borrowers' ability to repay small loans reliably, turning "repayment rate" into one of the sector's single most closely tracked statistics.
Interestingly, "pay" itself does retain one narrow regular use: in nautical contexts, "payed out" (with the regular spelling) describes rope or cable being let out or released, a specialized maritime sense entirely separate from the financial meaning and never applicable to "repay," which only ever uses the irregular "repaid" in all its senses. Student-loan and mortgage writing relies on "repay" and "repayment" as core technical vocabulary, with entire repayment plans and schedules named and structured around this single verb's most literal financial sense.
The common confusion
"Repaid" covers both simple past and participle without any split to worry about, so the real risk is spelling drift: some writers tack on a regular "-ed" and produce "repayed," an error more common among early English learners than fluent writers who've internalized "pay/paid" already.
How it's actually used
"Repay" spans literal financial contexts (repaying a loan, a debt) and figurative emotional ones (repaying kindness, repaying a favor, repaying someone's trust), with the figurative sense especially common in personal essays and expressions of gratitude. Gratitude-focused writing, from thank-you notes to memoirs, often uses "repay" in a deliberately impossible sense ("I could never repay you"), turning the verb into a rhetorical acknowledgment of a debt too large to settle rather than a literal financial statement. Court-ordered restitution specifically requires a convicted party to repay victims for financial losses, a legally mandated use of the verb distinct from any voluntary repayment. Community lending circles have used mutual repayment obligations as a form of informal credit for generations. Family loans are notoriously the hardest to formalize, since expecting a relative to repay on a strict schedule can strain a relationship in ways a bank loan never would. A cosigner on a loan effectively promises to repay it themselves if the primary borrower cannot. A generous friend rarely expects to be repaid quickly, but most borrowers still try to repay promptly anyway. A borrower who repays early sometimes saves meaningfully on total interest over the life of a loan.
Across the tense system
"Repaid" is the one spelling that has to serve both roles, so "she repaid the loan" and "she has repaid the loan" are distinguished only by whether an auxiliary verb precedes it. Loan agreements typically use the future-oriented "shall repay" or "agrees to repay" rather than any past-tense form, since such contracts describe obligations still to be fulfilled rather than completed actions.
Common real mistakes
The main error is the nonstandard spelling "repayed," following a regular -ed pattern that doesn't apply here. Little else trips writers up here, given how well established both the meaning and the irregular form already are. A further nuance: "repay" implies a prior debt or favor existed; it should not be used simply to mean "pay," which carries no such implication of a return obligation.
Examples
- She repaid the loan in full two years early.
- He has repaid every favor his mentor ever did for him.
- They repaid the community's kindness with a fundraiser of their own.
- The scholarship must be repaid if the student withdraws before graduation.
- He said he could never fully repay the mentorship he'd received as a young employee.
- The grant does not need to be repaid if the recipient meets all program requirements.
- The court ordered the company to repay affected customers within ninety days.
Memory trick
Follow "pay": pay, paid, paid becomes repay, repaid, repaid — the same spelling shift (ay to aid) applies identically in both words.