Blind 75 vs NeetCode 150: The Overlap, The Gaps, And What Companies Actually Ask
Both lists are free, both show up in every prep thread, and the honest framing of blind 75 vs neetcode 150 is that they aren’t really rivals. NeetCode 150 is built on top of the older list. So the question isn’t which one is better. It’s whether the extra problems buy you anything for the companies you’re actually interviewing at, and whether you have the hours to spend. I opened the six pages ranking for this query on 20 Aug 2026 to see where they agree. They mostly don’t, including on something as basic as how many hard problems each list contains.
If you want the Blind 75 vs NeetCode 150 verdict before the detail: under six weeks, do Blind 75 (or Grind 75 set to your hours). Eight to twelve weeks, do NeetCode 150. Already finished Blind 75? Do only the 75 problems NeetCode adds, starting with greedy and stack.
Blind 75 vs NeetCode 150: pick by calendar
Pick by calendar, then by target company. Not by which list has better vibes on Reddit.
| Your situation | Do this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Interviews inside 6 weeks | Blind 75, or Grind 75 set to your hours | Highest pattern coverage per hour spent |
| 8 to 12 weeks of runway | NeetCode 150 start to finish | Adds greedy, 2-D DP and a real two-pointers block |
| You already finished Blind 75 | Only the NeetCode extras | NeetCode 150 contains the Blind 75 as NeetCode hosts it, so only 75 problems are new |
| You learn from watching, not reading | NeetCode 150 | Every problem has a free video by the author |
| Rusty on fundamentals | NeetCode 150, slowly | The category order is a curriculum, not a checklist |
| Startup loop, two coding rounds | Blind 75 and stop | Advanced graphs and tries almost never appear |
What each list is now, not what it was in 2018
Blind 75 came out of a forum post by Yangshun Tay, then a Meta staff engineer, who pulled the questions from his own freeCodeCamp article and dropped them on Teamblind. Somebody reposted it to the LeetCode forum. The name stuck. Here’s the part almost nobody grinding it today knows: the author has moved on.
His Tech Interview Handbook now opens that page with a note dated April 2022 pointing readers at Grind 75 instead, which he describes as “a modern version of Blind 75 that you can customize”. Grind 75 asks how many hours a week you have and how many weeks you’ve got, then generates the schedule. That’s a better tool than a static list of 75. It’s also the single most useful thing in this comparison that the ranking pages skip.
I read the source file behind that handbook page on 20 Aug 2026 and counted what’s actually scheduled there today. The prose says he “further distilled the list down into only 50 questions”, but the five weekly tables now list 61 unique problems: 14 easy, 40 medium, 7 hard. The handbook repo sits at 142.0k stars on the same date. Adoption is not the problem. Version drift is.
NeetCode 150 came from Navdeep Singh, ex-Google, who started posting solution walkthroughs in 2020. The channel showed 1.11m subscribers when I checked it on 20 Aug 2026. The list runs across 18 categories, which I re-read from the neetcode-gh solutions repo the same day: arrays and hashing, two pointers, sliding window, stack, binary search, linked list, trees, tries, heap, backtracking, graphs, advanced graphs, 1-D DP, 2-D DP, greedy, intervals, math and geometry, bit manipulation. Every one of those 150 problems has a free video. That is the actual product.
Overlap and difficulty: the numbers nobody agrees on
Three of the six pages I opened on 20 Aug 2026 published a difficulty split for Blind 75. They gave 13 easy / 48 medium / 14 hard, 14 / 49 / 12, and 19 / 49 / 7. Same 75 problems. Three different answers.
That’s not sloppiness so much as a versioning problem. “Blind 75” was never released with a version number, several forks circulate, and LeetCode has quietly rerated some of these problems since 2018. One of those pages puts the overlap between the two lists at 85.3%, or 64 of the 75, leaving 11 problems that live only in Blind 75 and 86 that live only in NeetCode 150. Treat that as roughly right and stop optimising it. The overlap is high. The difficulty mix is close enough that it should not decide anything.
A correction to my own August numbers, after a second look on 23 Sep 2026. NeetCode’s own page describes the list as “the Blind 75 plus 75 more problems”, and the Blind 75 it hosts splits 19 easy, 49 medium and 7 hard. That’s the third of those three splits above. So if you use the version on neetcode.io, every one of the 75 is inside the 150. The 64-of-75 figure only applies if you’re comparing against an older fork of the original forum list. (This is the version drift problem again, just from the other side.)
The six categories NeetCode 150 actually adds
This is where the two lists genuinely part ways. The counts below come from the two ranking pages that published a full category table, cross-checked against the NeetCode category list in the solutions repo on 20 Aug 2026.
| Category | Blind 75 | NeetCode 150 | Does it matter? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greedy | 0 | 8 | Yes. Jump Game and gas station show up at mid-size shops |
| 2-D dynamic programming | 0 | ~11 | Yes for quant and payments loops, rarely elsewhere |
| Stack | 1 | 7 | Yes. Monotonic stack is a whole mental model |
| Backtracking | 2 | 9 | Sometimes. Doesn’t transfer from other DP work |
| Graphs and advanced graphs | 7 | 19 | Partly. Dijkstra and MST are low frequency |
| Tries | 1 | 3 | Only at search and autocomplete companies |
Read that column on the right again. Two of the six additions are close to mandatory, two are situational, and two are lottery tickets. If you’re going to do a partial pass, do greedy and stack first.
What actually gets asked, from August 2026 frequency data
Coverage arguments in the abstract are cheap. None of the six pages I opened on 20 Aug 2026 tested their coverage claims against what companies are reported to be asking, so I did. I pulled the leetcode-patterns dataset on 20 Aug 2026, which carried an update stamp of 2026-08-16 and 179 problems tagged with per-company report counts, and ranked it by total frequency across all companies. Then I checked each of the top ten against the 61 questions the Blind 75 author schedules today.
| # | Problem | Difficulty | Total reports | On the handbook’s 61? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Two Sum | Easy | 464 | Yes |
| 2 | Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters | Medium | 162 | Yes |
| 3 | Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock | Easy | 140 | Yes |
| 4 | Trapping Rain Water | Hard | 136 | No |
| 5 | Add Two Numbers | Medium | 127 | No |
| 6 | 3Sum | Medium | 118 | Yes |
| 7 | Merge Intervals | Medium | 113 | Yes |
| 8 | Group Anagrams | Medium | 108 | Yes |
| 9 | Longest Palindromic Substring | Medium | 104 | No |
| 10 | Number of Islands | Medium | 103 | Yes |
Seven of the top ten are already on the short schedule. Two Sum alone carries 464 reports, 209 of them tagged Google, which is more than the next three problems combined. Trapping Rain Water is the interesting miss: 136 reports, 44 of them Amazon, and it’s one of the problems NeetCode 150 adds. Add Two Numbers sits fifth and is on neither list, which is a useful reminder that a curated set is a floor rather than a ceiling.
Now the part that should change how you choose. When I weighted the same dataset by pattern rather than by problem, the top five patterns at Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft came out nearly identical: arrays, hash tables, two pointers, dynamic programming, sorting. Two pointers ranks third at all four. Tries, union-find and topological sort sit near the bottom of the tail. So the strongest argument for NeetCode 150 isn’t the exotic stuff at all. It’s that it gives two pointers, sliding window and stack their own blocks with a dozen-plus problems between them, where the older list scatters those patterns across categories named after data structures. The exotic categories are insurance. The pattern blocks are the actual upgrade.
One number from our own product
Of 1,393 interview sessions configured on LastRoundAI between January 2025 and July 2026, exactly 8 turned the coding round on. The other 1,385 didn’t. Whichever list you grind, the thing almost nobody rehearses is solving a problem out loud while someone watches the cursor blink. Pattern recall and performance under observation are different skills, and only one of them improves by doing more problems alone.
Grind 75 vs NeetCode 150 (and what Grind 169 is)
Grind 75 is a study planner, and NeetCode 150 is a fixed list with videos. Grind 75 builds a schedule from a pool of 169 problems based on the weeks and weekly hours you give it, so a short plan stays close to the Blind 75 while a long one reaches all 169. NeetCode 150 is the same 150 problems for everyone, in category order.
So, as with Blind 75 vs NeetCode 150, the choice is less about the problems than about how you work. People who drift without a calendar do better on Grind 75, because the tool hands you this week’s problems and nothing else. People who get stuck and need someone to talk them through the approach do better on NeetCode, because every problem has a walkthrough. The Grind 75 FAQ says its ranking sorts LeetCode problems by “popularity, frequency, companies, likes rating, topics covered”, and puts easy problems first because they carry the core patterns. “Grind 169” is just that full pool with no time limit set. It’s not a separate list, and I’d only run it if you have more than four months. We compared the older pair in more depth in Grind 75 vs Blind 75.
NeetCode 75, NeetCode 250, “Blind 150”: the names people mix up
Half the searches that land on this page use a list name that doesn’t quite exist. Here’s what each one actually refers to, checked on 23 Sep 2026.
| Name you saw | What it actually is | Size | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| NeetCode 75 | The Blind 75 as hosted on neetcode.io, with NeetCode’s videos attached | 75 | Same people as Blind 75 |
| NeetCode 150 | Blind 75 plus 75 more problems, grouped by pattern | 150 | Comfortable with basic data structures |
| NeetCode 250 | NeetCode 150 plus 100 more problems | 250 | Complete beginners, by NeetCode’s own description |
| “Blind 150” | Not a real list. Usually means NeetCode 150 | Use NeetCode 150 | |
| Grind 169 | The full Grind 75 pool with no time limit | 169 | Four months or more of runway |
| LeetCode 75 and Top Interview 150 | LeetCode’s own study plans, separate from all of the above | 75 and 150 | People who want to stay inside LeetCode |
The NeetCode 250 page calls it “the most beginner friendly list, intended for people completely new to algorithms”. I think that’s right, and it’s also more than most working engineers can finish while job hunting. I haven’t compared the contents of LeetCode’s two study plans against these lists (their pages returned a 403 to a plain fetch on 23 Sep), so treat that last row as a pointer, not a verdict.
Hours, and a schedule that survives a job search
Ignore week counts. Weeks assume a pace you won’t hold while employed. Hours are the honest unit, and the pages I opened on 20 Aug 2026 spread wide on them: 40 to 50 hours for Blind 75 at the low end, about 73 at the high end, and 85 to 152 hours for NeetCode 150. The spread is almost entirely about whether the estimate counts revision.
Do the arithmetic yourself. Budget 30 minutes for an easy, 45 for a medium, 60 for a hard on the first pass, then add half again for spaced review, because a problem you solved once and never revisited is a problem you cannot solve in eight weeks. That lands Blind 75 near 70 hours and NeetCode 150 near 140.
| Hours you can find per week | Realistic plan |
|---|---|
| 5 to 7 | Grind 75 set to your hours. Don’t attempt 150. |
| 8 to 12 | Blind 75 in about 7 weeks, then the greedy and stack extras |
| 13 to 18 | NeetCode 150 in 9 to 11 weeks with review built in |
| 20+ | NeetCode 150 in 7 weeks, then mocks, not more problems |
One rule that outranks all of the above: stop adding problems once you can recognise the pattern in under two minutes on a problem you’ve never seen. That’s the signal. Everything after it is repetition for its own sake, and it’s the point where a pattern cheat sheet and some timed interview simulation beat another twenty mediums.
Frequently asked questions
Is NeetCode 150 just Blind 75 with extra problems?
Yes, on NeetCode’s own site: the 150 is the Blind 75 plus 75 more. Against older copies of the forum list the overlap is closer to 64 of 75. The reorganisation matters more than the additions though, because NeetCode groups by pattern while the older list groups by data structure.
Should I do Blind 75 first, then NeetCode 150?
Only if you have three months or more. Otherwise you’ll redo up to 75 problems you already know. With less runway, pick one and finish it.
Is Grind 75 better than Blind 75 in 2026?
By the author’s own framing, yes. The handbook page calls Grind 75 “a modern version of Blind 75 that you can customize”, and it schedules against the hours you actually have. Name recognition is the only thing keeping the original ahead.
Is Grind 75 or NeetCode 150 better?
Grind 75 is better if you need a schedule, NeetCode 150 if you need explanations. The problem sets overlap heavily, so pick the one whose format you’ll actually finish.
Do I need NeetCode Pro?
No. All 150 problems and all 150 videos are free. The paid tier adds courses and extra tooling. I couldn’t get a price out of the pricing page on 20 Aug 2026 because it renders client side and returned nothing to a plain fetch, so check the live page rather than trusting a figure quoted in any comparison post, including this one.
Is either list enough for a FAANG loop?
For the coding rounds, usually. For the loop, no. Neither list touches system design, behavioural rounds, or the habit of narrating a partial solution without freezing.
How many problems should I redo versus attempt new?
Redo the ones you failed, at widening intervals. Once you’ve covered the main patterns, new volume is usually the weaker of the two options, and it feels far more productive than it is.
Written by
Hari Priya Vemula
Covers interview preparation and the candidate experience, from the first screen through to the final round.