Blind 75 vs NeetCode 150 vs Grind 75: Which List Should You Do?

The short answer

Pick by how much time you have, not by which list is "best". All three are built from the same pool of classic interview problems, and their problems are equally hard on average. What changes is how many topics they cover.

Blind 75 is the original and still a solid list, but in 2026 there is little reason to choose it over the other two: NeetCode 150 includes it whole, and Grind 75 is its updated version by the same author.

The three lists at a glance

How much do they overlap?

Less than most people assume. Grind 75 and Blind 75 were made by the same person, yet they share only 40 of their 75 problems. And 17 problems in Grind 75 are not in NeetCode 150 at all, including Flood Fill, Accounts Merge, Basic Calculator and Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling.

Three facts fall out of the chart:

• NeetCode 150 contains all of Blind 75. If you finish NeetCode 150, doing Blind 75 afterwards adds nothing.
• Doing all three is 167 problems, not 300. NeetCode 150 plus the 17 Grind-only problems covers every problem on every list.
• Moving from Blind 75 to Grind 75 costs less than it looks. The 40 shared problems carry over, so only 35 are new.

The Blind 75 problems that Grind 75 dropped are telling: Meeting Rooms I and II, Alien Dictionary, Graph Valid Tree, Encode and Decode Strings and Number of Connected Components are all Premium-only. Several bit manipulation puzzles went too, like Reverse Bits, Counting Bits and Sum of Two Integers.

Which topics each list covers

This is where the lists really differ. Switch the chart to "% of the list" to compare them on equal terms.

• Blind 75 is a dynamic programming list. 18 of its 75 problems are tagged DP (24%), against 11 in Grind 75 (15%). It also has 5 bit manipulation problems and no monotonic stack at all.
• NeetCode 150 fills the gaps. It has 16 heap problems, 12 backtracking and 13 binary search, against 3 to 5 of each in the shorter lists.
• Grind 75 trades bit tricks and some DP for stacks. It has 7 stack problems against 2 in Blind 75, and keeps DP to 11 classics.

If you do one of the short lists, check the topics it barely touches and add a few problems on each. The pattern guides for backtracking, binary search and the monotonic stack walk through each one step by step.

Is one list harder than the others?

No. The median acceptance rate, the share of submissions on LeetCode that pass, is almost identical: 58% for Blind 75 and 60% for NeetCode 150 and Grind 75. Broken down by label it is the same story:

The lowest acceptance rates in each list are well-known interview problems: Validate Binary Search Tree (36.5%) appears in all three, and Grind 75 includes String to Integer (atoi), at 22.0% the lowest of all 167 problems, mostly because of its edge cases. Acceptance rate is a rough signal at best, as we showed in how hard LeetCode really is, but it does rule out the idea that one list is the "hard mode" version of another.

What makes NeetCode 150 feel harder is its length and its Hards: 21 of them, against 7 in Blind 75 and 9 in Grind 75.

How many LeetCode problems do you actually need?

There is no number that guarantees an offer, and the count matters less than people think. These three lists are curated so that 75 to 150 problems cover the main patterns once or twice each. Past roughly 150 well-chosen problems, every new one mostly repeats a pattern you have already met.

For time, Grind 75's own planner is a useful benchmark: it budgets about 64 hours for its 75 problems, which is its default plan of 8 weeks at 8 hours a week. At the same pace NeetCode 150 takes roughly twice as long.

The real risk with any list is finishing it without being able to solve a problem you have not seen. That happens when you collect solutions instead of patterns, and it is why LeetCode can still feel hard after 150 problems.

Whatever list you pick: learn the pattern, not the answer

1. Go topic by topic, not in random order. NeetCode 150 is already grouped this way, and Grind 75 can be grouped by topic in its settings. Three or four problems on the same pattern in a row teach it far better than three on different ones.
2. Name the pattern before you code. Before writing anything, say which coding interview pattern the problem needs and why. If you cannot, that is the thing to study, not the problem.
3. Trace every solution you read. Follow it step by step on a small input until you could explain each line. An algorithm visualizer does this for you, with the pointers, the queue and the DP table on screen.
4. Re-solve after a few days. If you can write it again from the idea alone, you learned the pattern. If you cannot, you memorized the code.

Done this way, one list is enough. Done the other way, three lists are not.

Frequently asked questions

How we compared the lists

Blind 75 and NeetCode 150 come from the problem data NeetCode publishes in its public GitHub repository. Grind 75 is the list techinterviewhandbook.org generates with its default settings (8 weeks, 8 hours a week). Difficulty, acceptance rate, Premium status and topic tags come from LeetCode's public API. All data was collected on November 2, 2026, and problems were matched by their LeetCode URL. Lists and acceptance rates change over time.

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