The Blind 75: the full list with a free tracker

How to actually use the Blind 75

The mistake most people make with the Blind 75 is treating it as a checklist to rush through. The value is not in having solved 75 problems; it is in being able to look at a new, unseen problem and recognise which of these patterns it belongs to within the first minute. That recognition only comes from solving each problem deliberately, then articulating out loud why the pattern fits. Solve a problem, then close the editor and explain the approach as if to an interviewer: what is the brute-force, why is it too slow, what data structure removes the bottleneck, and what the time and space cost of the better solution is. If you cannot narrate it cleanly, you have memorised an answer rather than learned a pattern, and a small variation in the real interview will break you.

Work the list in the order it is grouped on this page, not in the order problems catch your eye. The grouping runs foundations first - arrays and hashing, then two pointers and sliding window - because those techniques underpin the harder sections. Trees and graphs lean on recursion and traversal habits you build earlier; dynamic programming, the section people fear most, becomes tractable once you are comfortable defining a state and a transition, which the earlier problems quietly train. Skipping ahead to dynamic programming on day one is the single most common reason people stall and conclude they are bad at this. They are not; they skipped the runway.

A realistic four-week schedule

If you have a month, a workable rhythm is to spend the first week on arrays, hashing, two pointers, sliding window, and stacks - the highest-frequency, lowest-abstraction patterns that also show up most often in real loops. Use the second week for binary search, linked lists, and trees, which reward careful pointer and recursion habits. Reserve the third week for graphs and the start of dynamic programming, and the final week to finish dynamic programming, intervals, greedy, and the math and bit-tricks tail, then re-solve anything you flagged. Aim to revisit a problem two or three days after you first solve it; the second pass, from memory, is where the pattern actually sticks. The tracker on this page makes that spaced repetition easy to see, because a problem you ticked but can no longer solve is a problem you should untick and redo.

Time yourself from week two onward. In a real interview you have roughly 30 to 45 minutes per problem including talking through it, so practising untimed gives a false sense of readiness. When a medium consistently takes you under 25 minutes including a clean explanation, that pattern is ready. When a problem still takes 50 minutes after two attempts, do not grind it in isolation - read the optimal approach, understand the key insight, then re-solve from scratch the next day. Understanding the trick and then reproducing it unaided is far more efficient than staring at a blank editor for an hour.

What the Blind 75 does not cover

Be clear-eyed about the list's limits. The Blind 75 is a coding-round core, not a complete interview plan. It does not touch system design, which is its own discipline and dominates senior and staff loops, nor behavioural interviews, which sink more candidates than people admit. It is also intentionally thin in a few coding areas: tries, heaps, and advanced graph algorithms each get only a problem or two, so if a target company is known to lean on those, supplement deliberately. Treat the 75 as the trunk and add branches - a few company-tagged problems, a system-design primer, and rehearsed behavioural stories - rather than as the whole tree. The cross-links below point to the rest of that plan on this site.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Blind 75?

The Blind 75 is a curated set of around 75 LeetCode problems first posted on the teamblind.com forum by an engineer who used it to prepare for FAANG interviews. It is deliberately small: instead of grinding hundreds of problems, you cover one or two canonical examples of each major data-structures-and-algorithms pattern. Because the patterns repeat across real interview loops, finishing the list gives you a working answer for the large majority of questions you will face, which is why it became the most-cited minimum-viable prep set in the industry. Deduplicated by problem, the canonical list works out to a few under 75 because a couple of problems originally appeared in two categories.

Is the Blind 75 still relevant in 2026?

Yes. Interview formats shift, but the underlying patterns - hashing, two pointers, sliding window, binary search, trees, graphs, dynamic programming - have not changed in years and still drive almost every coding round at large tech companies. The Blind 75 covers exactly those patterns, so it remains an efficient core. Pair it with company-tagged practice closer to your interview date, and add a handful of recent or company-favourite problems on top, but the 75 is still the right place to start.

How long does the Blind 75 take?

Most people finish in four to eight weeks. If you can comfortably solve a medium in 30 to 40 minutes, budget around two hours per day and you will clear the list in roughly a month. If data structures are rusty, slow down: spend the first week or two on the arrays, hashing, and two-pointer sections before touching trees, graphs, and dynamic programming. The tracker on this page lets you see your real pace rather than guessing.

Blind 75 or NeetCode 150 - which should I do?

Start with the Blind 75 if you are short on time or new to interview prep; it is the tighter, faster core. Move to the NeetCode 150, which is a strict superset, if you have more runway, want fuller coverage of each pattern, or keep getting stumped by a category. Many candidates do the Blind 75 first as a confidence-building pass, then fill the gaps with the extra 75 problems on the NeetCode list. Both share the same progress model here, so you will not lose your place.

Do I need LeetCode Premium for the Blind 75?

No. Every problem on the Blind 75 is free to solve on LeetCode, and the links on this page go straight to the free problem pages. Premium adds company-specific tags and the ability to filter problems by which company asked them, which is genuinely useful in the final week before a specific interview, but it is not required to complete the list itself.