Is LeetCode Premium Worth It in 2026?

LeetCode Premium runs $35 a month or $159 a year on LeetCode's own pricing page as of our latest check, and it's worth it if you already solve most medium-difficulty problems without hints and want to filter the platform's 3,000-plus problems down to whatever a specific company has actually asked recently. It's a weaker buy if you're still building core pattern recognition from scratch, since that part of LeetCode is free already, or if your upcoming loop leans on system design, OOD, or SQL rounds, where Premium's coverage is thin compared to what it does for coding interviews.

Most existing answers to this question either summarize Premium's feature list without checking whether the price on the page still matches what people paid last year, or they compare it to a single paid competitor like AlgoExpert and stop there. Neither approach answers the question a candidate a few weeks from an onsite actually has: does the subscription buy something a free, company-tagged source can't, and for how long do you realistically need it. This page checks the current price directly against LeetCode's own subscribe page, lays out where the company tags earn their keep and where the rest of the subscription is thinner than the marketing implies, and lines it up against a free alternative so the decision takes a few minutes instead of an afternoon of tab-switching.

We pulled pricing straight from leetcode.com/subscribe rather than trusting whichever number ranked highest, and cross-checked feature claims against several independent write-ups published at different points during 2025 and 2026, since a couple of the most-cited reviews online are still quoting an old $39 monthly rate that no longer matches the live page.

What does LeetCode Premium actually include?

The headline feature is company-tagged problems: LeetCode rolls up self-reported data from candidates who tag which problems showed up in their own interviews, then surfaces those tags and frequency counts filtered by company. Premium also adds detailed, staff-written solution editorials for every problem instead of just the community discussion threads, video explanations for a subset of problems, and automated mock interviews built as timed problem sets with a performance summary at the end.

Beyond the coding catalog, Premium adds a system design course with company-tagged system design questions, and an Advanced SQL 50 study plan pulled from the roughly 117 database problems on the platform. None of the three read as a full curriculum the way a dedicated course from a competitor does; they're closer to a curated slice of an existing problem set than a taught path built around it. The video explanations only cover a portion of the catalog rather than every problem, so for a lot of harder or less common questions you're still reading the written editorial, and the mock interview mode reuses the same problem set rather than drawing from a separate bank built for timed practice.

How reliable are LeetCode's company tags, really?

LeetCode does let Premium subscribers filter a company's tagged problems by recency window, last six months, last year, or last two years, and sort by how often each one comes up inside that window, so the feature isn't hiding how old a given report is. What it can't control is how many people actually bother to tag a problem after their own interview. A company that runs thousands of loops a year, Amazon, Google, and Meta being the obvious examples, accumulates enough self-reported tags that the resulting list is genuinely dense and useful. A smaller or fast-growing company with a few hundred loops a year ends up with a much thinner, patchier list, not because candidates aren't interviewing there, but because fewer of them circle back to tag what they were asked. The filter itself works exactly as advertised; the data behind it is only as good as how many people at that specific company chose to contribute.

How much does LeetCode Premium cost right now?

As of our most recent check on leetcode.com/subscribe, the monthly plan is $35 and the annual plan is $159, both billed upfront with no proration if you switch plans mid-cycle. A group student discount brings the annual plan to $119 a seat, but only if 50 or more students from the same school register together through a referral link; fall short of that threshold and everyone who signed up gets refunded rather than charged the full rate. There's no individual student pricing outside that group program.

LeetCode's stated policy is no refunds once you've paid, for either plan, and both auto-renew unless you cancel, though canceling still leaves your access active through the end of the period you already paid for. A handful of widely shared reviews still quote $39 a month, a number that was accurate at some point but doesn't match the live page anymore, which is its own reminder to confirm the current figure on LeetCode's own site before you pay rather than trusting the first number a search turns up.

Whether the monthly or annual plan makes more sense comes down to how long you actually need it, not which one looks cheaper per month. A candidate with a single onsite three weeks out spends $35 once and cancels before the next charge, which comes out cheaper than the $159 annual rate if the search wraps up inside two months. Someone running a longer search across multiple companies over several months crosses over to the annual plan being the better deal once they'd otherwise pay for five months, since $159 works out to less than $35 times five. The annual plan only pays for itself if the search genuinely runs that long; paying for a full year to cover six weeks of active prep is the single most common way candidates overpay for Premium.

What does LeetCode Premium do well?

The company tags are the part every independent review agrees on, and they hold up under scrutiny: for a candidate with a confirmed onsite at a specific company, filtering thousands of problems down to the ones that company has actually asked recently, ranked by how often, is exactly the kind of signal a free, unfiltered list can't give you. The staff-written solution editorials are also a genuine step up from crowdsourced discussion posts, since they cover multiple approaches with complexity trade-offs explained in one place instead of scattered across dozens of community threads of varying quality.

Because Premium sits on top of the same 3,000-plus problem catalog everyone already uses for free, there's no switching cost or new interface to learn. You keep your existing submission history, your solved-problem streak, and every bookmark, and the subscription just adds filters and content layered on top of a platform you were probably already using.

Where does LeetCode Premium fall short?

The mock interview feature is the weakest part of the subscription by most accounts: it's a timed, randomized problem set with a summary afterward, not a simulated conversation with a real interviewer who pushes back on your approach or asks a follow-up when you get stuck. Several reviewers who've used both note that a real mock interview, even an unpaid one traded with a peer, teaches the think-out-loud skill Premium's automated version can't.

The bigger gap is coverage outside coding. System design gets a course and some tagged questions, but reviewers consistently describe it as a bridge rather than a deep curriculum, closer to what you'd get from a handful of good blog posts than a structured course. SQL prep is a 50-problem study plan, useful for drilling syntax but not a taught path through query patterns. OOD has no dedicated section whatsoever; whatever exists lives in community discussion posts, the same free resource a non-subscriber can already read. If your loop includes any of those three rounds, Premium's $159 a year is mostly paying for the coding half of your prep.

LeetCode Premium vs a free curated question bank: when does the subscription pay off?

The table below lines up LeetCode's free tier, LeetCode Premium, and LiveCodingInterview.com on the specifics that actually change a decision.

None of that makes Premium a bad purchase; the company tags do real work for the exact candidate they're built for. It means the subscription is solving one specific problem, filtering a huge catalog down to one company's recent history, and not the broader one some reviews imply it solves. That narrower gap is what LiveCodingInterview.com is built to close: a selectively curated bank of coding, system design, OOD, and SQL questions sourced from real candidate reports rather than a fixed catalog, tagged by company and by how recently each one was seen, currently free while the pricing page explains.

When does paying for LeetCode Premium actually make sense?

Timing and what round you're prepping for matter more here than the price alone. Two candidates with the same upcoming interview can get very different value out of the same $35, one because they have a confirmed loop and a known reasoning baseline to build on, the other because they're still several weeks from even having an interview scheduled and would get more out of spending that time on fundamentals instead. A few situations cover most candidates who end up buying it.

• You have a confirmed onsite with a specific company in the next few weeks: the company tags turn a 3,000-problem catalog into a short, ranked list, which is the one thing about Premium that does the most for your remaining prep time.
• You already solve most mediums without hints: the subscription filters problems for you; it doesn't teach you how to solve them, so it pays off once reasoning speed is no longer your bottleneck.
• Your loop is coding-heavy with light or no system design, OOD, or SQL: that's where Premium's coverage is strongest and the $159 a year does the most work relative to its cost.
• Your loop leans on system design, OOD, or SQL rounds: skip it, or at least don't expect Premium alone to cover those; a source built specifically for those question types will do more with the same weeks.

Is LeetCode Premium worth it for you?

It comes down to what round you're actually prepping for more than the price tag. If you have a confirmed loop at a specific company and already have the fundamentals down, $159 a year for a ranked, company-tagged shortlist is a reasonable trade, especially against the cost of missing an offer over avoidable prep gaps. If you're still building pattern recognition, LeetCode's free tier already has what you need, and paying for company tags before you can reliably solve the underlying problems is paying for a filter you can't use yet.

Weigh the $35 or $159 against what a missed offer actually costs, not against your monthly budget in isolation. If Premium genuinely gets you into an onsite better prepared, it's a small amount of money relative to the outcome; if you'd be buying it out of anxiety a few days before a screen with no company tags to filter by yet, that money and the hours you'd spend browsing the catalog are both better spent on a smaller number of problems solved carefully.

It's also worth being honest about what a self-reported tagging system, however useful, structurally can't promise: certainty that a tag from six months ago still reflects what a company is asking this quarter. You can see that distinction concretely on a page like the Amazon company page here, where each question is tagged by how recently it was reported instead of carrying an indefinite, undated tag.

If you want the wider field of paid courses, free grinders, and curated banks rather than this one head-to-head, the LeetCode alternatives guide covers all three categories, and the AlgoExpert review covers the closest paid competitor to Premium's coding-only focus.

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