Short answer: for most candidates, LeetCode Premium is worth it only as a one- or two-month purchase timed to a real interview at a company with a large tagged question list, such as Google, Amazon, Meta or Microsoft. At $35 a month or $159 a year, what you are mainly paying for is company-tagged question lists sorted by how often and how recently they were reported, plus official editorials, 785 Premium-only problems and a few editor tools. If you are still learning the core patterns or have no interview booked, the free tier is enough: LeetCode 75, Top Interview 150 and Top 100 Liked contain no Premium-only problems at all.
We checked prices, problem counts and editorial access against LeetCode's own site and help center on October 11, 2026. Prices and features change, so confirm on the subscribe page before you pay.
What LeetCode Premium costs in 2026
| Plan | Price (USD) | Effective monthly cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $35, billed monthly | $35 | One prep sprint before a booked interview loop |
| Yearly | $159, billed yearly | $13.25 | Year-round practice or several hiring cycles |
The break-even math is simple. Four months of the monthly plan cost $140 and five cost $175, so the yearly plan only saves money if you would otherwise keep Premium for five months or more. For a single interview push, pay monthly.
Four policies from LeetCode's help center are worth knowing before you click Subscribe:
- Refunds are rare. LeetCode says subscriptions are non-refundable in most cases, though it reviews requests case by case. Cancel before your renewal date; you keep access until the end of the period you paid for.
- Upgrading is pro-rated. If you start monthly and switch to yearly while still subscribed, the unused part of your current month counts toward the annual price.
- Your code survives, access does not. After Premium lapses you can still retrieve code you wrote for Premium problems, but you cannot run or submit those problems.
- There is no standing promo code. The help center lists no ongoing discount and says special promotions, when LeetCode runs them, are announced on its Facebook and Twitter accounts.
What Premium actually includes
LeetCode's subscribe page and help center list the features below. The last column is our judgment of how much each one moves interview results.
| Feature | What you get | Interview value |
|---|---|---|
| Company-specific questions | Problems grouped by company, sortable by role, time window and frequency | High, if you have a target company |
| Premium editorials | Official written solutions, some with video; many are Premium-only | Medium; free community solutions cover a lot of it |
| Interview simulations | Timed mock interviews and assessments aimed at a specific company | Medium; useful for pacing |
| Premium-only problems | 785 of the roughly 4,080 problems on the site (129 easy, 462 medium, 194 hard) | Low to medium |
| Premium study plans and Explore cards | Includes the Premium Algo 100 and Advanced SQL 50 plans | Low to medium |
| Debugger and autocomplete | Breakpoints and code completion in the browser editor | Low |
| Lightning Judge | Priority judging, which LeetCode says is up to 10 times faster at peak hours | Low |
| Ask Leet credits | Extra monthly credits for LeetCode's built-in AI coding assistant | Low |
| Cloud storage, unlimited Playgrounds, store discounts | Convenience extras | None |
Strip away the conveniences and three features carry nearly all of the interview value: company tags with frequency, editorials, and timed simulations. The rest makes practice more comfortable, which is not the same as making you better at interviews. Amazon's SDE II interview prep page, for example, tells candidates to expect to write syntactically correct code with no pseudocode, and to practice beforehand if they feel rusty coding without an IDE. Leaning on autocomplete and a debugger can quietly work against you.
Company tags and frequency: the feature you are really paying for
Each company gets its own question list that Premium members can sort by frequency and filter by time window. On the company pages we looked at, the windows were 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, more than 6 months, and all time. Two facts about this data matter more than anything in the marketing copy.
It is crowd-reported. LeetCode's help center says the company lists are compiled from a user survey that asks, "Have you met this question in a real interview?" The companies do not supply these lists. A tag means some candidates reported seeing a problem, not that it sits in a current question bank.
The all-time lists are too big to be useful. When we checked LeetCode's list sizes on October 11, 2026, Google's all-time list held about 2,330 problems, more than half of the entire site. The recent windows are where the signal is:
| Company | Last 30 days | Last 3 months | All time |
|---|---|---|---|
| ~155 | ~470 | ~2,330 | |
| Amazon | ~130 | ~460 | ~2,020 |
| Microsoft | ~55 | ~215 | ~1,375 |
| Meta | ~30 | ~165 | ~1,400 |
Even the 6-month window is a lot: Google's held about 795 problems and Amazon's about 735 when we checked. These counts move daily as the windows roll forward, but the shape holds: a 30-day or 3-month list is a realistic study target for a month of prep, while an all-time list is mostly the full problem set with a company name on it. Question pools also vary by team, level and location, and candidates commonly report interviewers changing the inputs or adding a follow-up to a familiar problem. Treat a high-frequency tag as a strong hint about topic and difficulty, not a preview of your interview. Our guide to using LeetCode company-tagged questions goes deeper on reading these lists.
How much is locked: editorials and Premium-only problems
The free tier is bigger than many people assume. Of the roughly 4,080 problems on LeetCode when we checked, 3,296 were free and 785 were Premium-only. More importantly, the popular study lists are built almost entirely from free problems:
| List | Problems | Premium-only on LeetCode |
|---|---|---|
| LeetCode 75 | 75 | 0 |
| Top Interview 150 | 150 | 0 |
| Top 100 Liked | 100 | 0 |
| SQL 50 | 50 | 0 |
| Blind 75 | 75 | 6 |
| NeetCode 150 | 150 | 7 |
The six locked Blind 75 problems are Meeting Rooms, Meeting Rooms II, Encode and Decode Strings, Graph Valid Tree, Number of Connected Components in an Undirected Graph, and Alien Dictionary; NeetCode 150 adds Walls and Gates. NeetCode's own site has practice pages for all seven outside its paid Pro plan, so you can finish either list without LeetCode Premium. The Blind 75 guide and the NeetCode 150 roadmap cover a sensible working order for each.
Editorials are where the paywall bites harder. When we checked, the official editorial was marked Premium-only for 139 of the 150 problems in Top Interview 150 and 58 of the 75 in LeetCode 75. That sounds like a strong case for paying, but every problem also has a free Solutions tab of community write-ups, and popular problems have thousands of them. The official editorials are more consistent and better organized. The top few community posts are free and usually good enough if you read them critically.
Who should buy it, and who should skip it
Premium is probably worth it if
- You have a phone screen or onsite booked in the next two to six weeks at a company with a large recent tagged list.
- You have already worked through a core list and can solve most mediums in 25 to 30 minutes, so your time goes to company-specific work instead of fundamentals.
- You learn better from structured written explanations than from videos or forum posts.
- You will actually use the timed simulations to practice pacing under a clock.
- You are preparing for a data or analytics role and want harder SQL practice: the Advanced SQL 50 study plan is Premium-only, while the regular SQL 50 plan is free.
- $35 is small next to what the offer is worth to you.
Skip it, at least for now, if
- You are still learning the basic patterns. Free lists cover that, and a company list with several hundred problems will only overwhelm you.
- You have no interview scheduled. Frequency data is most useful close to the interview. Months ahead, you are paying for a 30-day window that will have rolled over by the time you need it.
- Your target companies have few tagged questions or use take-home projects and practical coding rounds instead of algorithm problems.
- Money is tight. Nothing in Premium is required to pass a coding interview, and every core pattern can be practiced on free problems.
How to get the most out of one month
- Do the fundamentals first, for free. Finish a core list before paying, so your Premium month goes to company-specific work rather than learning what a sliding window is.
- Subscribe monthly once the interview is booked. Put a reminder on your calendar to cancel a couple of days before the renewal date.
- Pull the 30-day and 3-month lists for your target company. Sort by frequency and ignore the all-time list.
- Triage, don't grind. Work the top 30 to 50 problems by frequency. Give each one a real 25-minute attempt before opening the editorial, then put any miss on a re-solve list for two and five days later.
- Group by pattern. When several tagged problems share a technique, solve them back to back. You are learning the patterns that company leans on, not memorizing individual answers.
- Run timed simulations in the final week. Use the company-targeted mock assessments to check that you can finish inside the clock.
- Practice explaining out loud. Solving silently and solving while narrating your approach are different skills, and live rounds test the second one. A free AI mock interview in CoPilot Interview covers this: paste the job description and your résumé, choose a mix weighted toward coding and technical questions, talk through each answer, and get a score with what worked and what to improve.
One month, one company. Premium works best as a short, targeted tool: subscribe when the interview is real, work the recent list hard, and cancel when the loop is over.
Free alternatives that cover most of Premium
| Premium feature | Free substitute | What you give up |
|---|---|---|
| Company tags | Interview-experience posts in LeetCode's Discuss section, the company's own prep pages (Amazon publishes an SDE interview prep guide, for example), and company-specific guides like the ones linked below | Frequency sorting and a single ranked list |
| Official editorials | Top-voted community posts on each problem's Solutions tab; NeetCode's free video walkthroughs for its lists | Consistent structure and quality |
| Locked Blind 75 and NeetCode 150 problems | NeetCode's own practice pages for those seven problems | Very little |
| Interview simulations | A 45-minute timer on an unseen medium with the Solutions tab closed, or LeetCode's free weekly contests | Company-specific question selection |
| Debugger and autocomplete | Your local IDE while learning, then a plain editor once you start interview-style practice | Convenience only |
One thing to avoid: browser extensions and repositories that claim to unlock Premium company data. They are unofficial, their data can be months out of date, and an extension that can read your LeetCode session is a security risk you do not need. If the company list matters that much to you, $35 for one month is the cleaner option.
Practice the explanation, not just the solution
Premium can tell you which problems a company tends to ask, but not how your explanation sounds. CoPilot Interview's free plan (15 minutes a day, no credit card) runs AI mock interviews built from your résumé and the job description, scores every spoken answer, and ends with a report of likely next-round questions and practice drills.
Try a free AI mock interviewFAQ
How much does LeetCode Premium cost in 2026?
LeetCode Premium costs $35 a month billed monthly, or $159 billed once a year, which works out to $13.25 a month (US prices, checked October 2026). The yearly plan only saves money if you would otherwise pay for five or more months.
Is LeetCode Premium worth it for FAANG interviews?
It is most useful in the few weeks before a booked loop at a company with a large tagged list, when the 30-day and 3-month frequency lists help you prioritize. It is not required: free lists cover the core patterns, and company tags are crowd-reported hints rather than the actual question bank.
Can I do Blind 75 or NeetCode 150 without Premium?
Yes. Blind 75 has six problems that are Premium-only on LeetCode and NeetCode 150 has seven, and NeetCode's own site has practice pages for those problems outside its paid plan. LeetCode 75 and Top Interview 150 contain no Premium-only problems at all.
Where does LeetCode's company tag data come from?
LeetCode's help center says the company lists are compiled from user surveys asking whether people met a question in a real interview. That makes the tags a useful signal, but not an official list from the companies.
Can I get a refund on LeetCode Premium?
Usually not. LeetCode's policy says subscriptions are non-refundable in most cases, with requests reviewed case by case, so cancel before your renewal date; your access continues until the end of the period you paid for.