Pay Back

How to Conjugate Pay Back

  • Infinitive: Pay Back
  • Present Tense: Pay Back/ Pays Back
  • -ing Form: Paying Back
  • Past Tense: Paid Back
  • Past Participle: Paid Back
Pay Back is a separable phrasal verb and has 2 definitions.

Definitions of Pay Back:

1. When you return money that you owe someone.

Examples: Can you pay me back the $1,000 you owe me?
When I got the loan, I didn’t think about paying it back.

2. An action meant to reciprocate or revenge a past action taken by someone else.

Examples: When Jane’s parents banned her from using Facebook, she paid them back by dyeing her hair green.
James volunteers at a homeless shelter as a way of paying back the community for the help he got as a child.

See our complete list of English phrasal verbs.