Two coding-interview lists called 75, and only eight questions in common

On 20 August 2026 I pulled both lists and matched them by LeetCode problem slug. Eight questions sit on both. That is the short version of leetcode 75 vs blind 75: two study lists carrying the same number in the name, agreeing on eight problems, disagreeing on the rest.

The lists also come from different places. One is a product feature with a progress bar. The other is a forum post that picked up a nickname and never went away. If you’re choosing a list this week, that difference will shape your prep more than the topic tags will.

What LeetCode 75 vs Blind 75 actually refers to

LeetCode 75 is a study plan LeetCode runs on its own site. Seventy-five questions, sorted into 22 topic sections that run from Array / String at the top to Monotonic Stack at the bottom. I pulled the plan’s question data on 20 August 2026 and not one of the 75 is flagged paid-only, so you can open all of them without a Premium account.

Blind 75 has a messier origin. Yangshun curated it, and his page on Tech Interview Handbook introduces him as “an ex-Meta Staff Engineer, author of this handbook and Blind 75”. He wrote the questions up in a freeCodeCamp article, posted the extracted list on Blind, and somebody reposted it to the LeetCode forum. His own account of what followed: “It somehow blew up and became super famous in the coding interview scene, people even gave it a name – Blind 75”.

One list has an owner, a URL and a tracker. The other is a name that stuck to a set of problems. That is why the Blind list travels in copies, and why two people working through Blind 75 are not always solving the same 75 questions. Our own walkthrough of the Blind 75 list is one of those copies, for what it’s worth.

I matched the two lists and got an overlap of eight

Here’s the method, so you can redo it in about ten minutes. For LeetCode 75 I used the study plan’s own question data, fetched 20 August 2026: 75 questions, 22 groups, 22 Easy and 53 Medium. For the Blind side I used the five-week schedule Yangshun publishes on Tech Interview Handbook, which holds 50 core questions plus 11 marked optional, so 61 rows. Then I matched on LeetCode’s problem slug rather than on question titles, because the titles drift (his sheet says Reverse a Linked List, LeetCode says Reverse Linked List, same problem).

Eight rows matched:

Two caveats on that number, because I’d rather you trust the small print than the headline. The 61 rows are the author’s distilled schedule, not the original 75 that circulated on the forum. And the forum repost his page links to returned a 403 to my fetch on 20 August, so I worked from the version he maintains himself rather than from a mirror I can’t vouch for. If you match against a different Blind copy you’ll land on a slightly different count. You won’t land anywhere near total agreement, though. The two lists were built for different jobs.

The arithmetic that follows from eight is the useful part. Do both lists end to end and you’re looking at 128 distinct problems, not 136, since the shared eight only get solved once. Do LeetCode 75 and then the 50 core rows of the schedule and it’s 118, because seven of the eight overlaps live in those core rows. Neither number is a weekend.

Difficulty and paywalls are the real split

Zero Hard problems in LeetCode 75. That is a design decision, not an oversight, and it cuts both ways: you’ll finish the plan feeling competent, then meet Word Search II in a real onsite and freeze. The six questions marked Premium on the handbook page are Encode and Decode Strings, Meeting Rooms, Meeting Rooms II, Graph Valid Tree, Number of Connected Components in an Undirected Graph, and Alien Dictionary. All six sit in the optional rows, which is a fair way to handle a paywall you don’t control.

The 22 sections look like broader coverage than they are. Nine of them hold exactly two questions each: Prefix Sum, Queue, Binary Tree – BFS, Binary Search Tree, Graphs – BFS, Backtracking, Trie, Intervals and Monotonic Stack. Two questions is an introduction to a pattern. It isn’t enough to make the pattern stick under interview pressure, and it’s the main reason I treat the plan as a warm-up rather than a finish line.

Worth reading the author’s aside on dynamic programming while you’re on that page: “Practically speaking the return of investment (ROI) on studying and practicing for DP questions is very low.” He still lists ten DP questions. He just tells you where they rank.

So which one should you do first?

Do LeetCode 75 first if your last coding round fell apart on implementation rather than on ideas. It’s free end to end, it has no Hard problems, and its 22 sections give you a topic map. Switch to the Blind list once you have onsites booked, because it carries the classics that panels reuse and the Hard problems you’ll otherwise meet cold.

That’s the recommendation for most people, and I hold it loosely. If you already solve Mediums under pressure, LeetCode 75 will bore you by section six and you should skip straight to the Blind set or to the wider NeetCode 150. If you have three weeks and a full-time job, do neither list in full. Pick the 20 problems that map to the patterns your target company actually asks and drill those.

One thing neither list trains, and this is where candidates lose offers: talking while you type. You can solve Koko Eating Bananas in silence and still fail the round. Practising that out loud is the gap our interview copilot was built for, and it’s also why we keep a patterns cheat sheet rather than another problem list.

Tracking is a small difference that turns into a real one by week three. LeetCode 75 ticks itself off inside your LeetCode account. The Blind route leaves you managing your own progress, though the handbook points you at a LeetCode list of the questions, minus the Premium ones, that you can use to track practice.

What each list leaves you short on

LeetCode 75 has no Two Sum, no Valid Parentheses, no 3Sum, no Merge Intervals, no Number of Islands and no Course Schedule. Read that list again if you’re interviewing at a company that reuses the greatest hits, because a plan with no topological sort question in it has a hole exactly where Course Schedule usually goes. Its graph work is Keys and Rooms, Number of Provinces, Reorder Routes to Make All Paths Lead to the City Zero, Evaluate Division, Nearest Exit from Entrance in Maze and Rotting Oranges. Good problems. Not the ones a Google phone screen reaches for.

The five-week Blind schedule has the opposite shape. No bit manipulation rows, no monotonic stack, no prefix sum. Its sliding-window work is three questions, and one of them is Minimum Window Substring, which is a Hard. Whether that matters depends on where you’re applying. Bit tricks come up more in embedded and systems interviews than in a product-engineering loop, and I would not reorder a study plan around them. Monotonic stack is the one I would not skip.

Intervals make the contrast concrete. LeetCode 75 gives you two: Non-overlapping Intervals and Minimum Number of Arrows to Burst Balloons. The handbook schedule gives you Merge Intervals, Insert Interval and Non-overlapping Intervals, which is the sequence an interviewer builds on when they ask a calendar question and then extend it. Same topic, different intent. One is teaching you the shape of the problem, the other is rehearsing you for a specific round.

Neither gap is fatal on its own. Both are worth knowing about before you spend six weeks inside one list and assume you’re covered.

How I’d sequence them

Three weeks on LeetCode 75, skipping the Easy sections you can already do in your head, which for most working engineers is Prefix Sum, Queue and half of Array / String. Then the 50 core rows of the handbook schedule, in his order, with the Hard ones left in rather than skipped. Then, if a specific company is in play, whatever their tagged list looks like. That’s about seven weeks at 2 hours a day, which is more than most people budget.

If you’d rather have a version you can reshape, Yangshun built Grind 75 for exactly that, and describes it on the handbook as “a modern version of Blind 75 that you can customize”. It takes your available hours and generates a schedule. For a lot of readers that beats arguing about which of two fixed lists is better.

The thing I keep coming back to is the eight. Two of the most recommended lists in coding-interview prep, both called 75, and a candidate who finishes one has done roughly a tenth of the other. If someone tells you the two are interchangeable, ask them which eight.