Is LeetCode Premium Worth It? 2026 Review of the Paid Tier
Quick Overview
LeetCode Premium costs $35 a month or $159 a year as of October 2026 and adds company tags, premium problems, a debugger and timed simulations. It pays off for a candidate with a large-company onsite within weeks; new grads learning patterns should stay on free LeetCode. Company tags show the pattern, not the question as asked, so pair free practice with real candidate-reported questions.
LeetCode Premium is the paid tier of LeetCode's coding-practice site: company-tagged questions, premium-only problems, a debugger and timed company simulations. It is worth it for one kind of candidate, someone with an onsite at a large tech company in the next few weeks. A new grad still learning patterns should stay on free LeetCode. When checked on October 14, 2026, Premium costs $35 a month or $159 a year, and fees are non-refundable. To see what companies ask now, start with PracHub's coding questions.
Pricing and product details were checked on October 14, 2026.
Quick Verdict: Is LeetCode Premium Worth It?
Choose LeetCode Premium when you have a named target company big enough to have a long tagged list and an onsite within a month or two. Buy one month and cancel before the renewal date.
Choose PracHub when you want to read questions as candidates reported them, across more than 550 companies as of October 2026, and you want to start without paying: most questions are free.
Short answer, by reader:
- New grad grinding patterns: keep your money.
- Candidate with a named company in weeks: one month can pay off, because company tags are the only Premium feature that changes what you study.
- Repeat interviewer: buy one month per prep cycle. Yearly only pays off if you will practice for five months or more in a row.
What Is LeetCode Premium?
LeetCode is an online coding judge and interview-practice site. The free account gets the non-premium questions and articles, and its submissions are judged: when checked on October 14, 2026, Premium only adds priority judging. Contests need only a free account and are ranked, and the Discuss forum is where users post solutions (LeetCode help center, archived February 2024).
According to LeetCode's subscribe page (archived July 2026), Premium adds:
- Company-specific questions, billed as "real questions from top companies", sortable by role, time or frequency.
- Premium-only questions, Explore cards and premium official solutions.
- Interview Simulations: pick a company, get a timed question, practice under a clock.
- Tooling: autocomplete, a debugger with breakpoints, cloud-saved code and layouts, unlimited Playgrounds, and "Lightning Judge" priority judging, "up to 10x faster during peak hours".
- Ask Leet credits: 500 extra monthly credits for its AI coding agent plus up to 30 solution analyses a day.
Some things we could not confirm. Live leetcode.com blocked automated checks on October 13, 2026, and the archived pages we could open do not say how many problems exist or how many are premium-only. They also do not list the tagged companies or explain how a problem earns a company tag.
LeetCode Premium Pricing in 2026
| Plan | Price (LeetCode) | Billing | Anchor price shown |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium Monthly | $35 a month (October 14, 2026) | Billed monthly, auto-renews | "Down from $39/month" |
| Premium Yearly | $159 a year, shown as $13.25 a month (October 14, 2026) | Billed yearly, auto-renews | "previously sold for $299" |
| Student group plan | $119 a year (March 2026) | Needs 50 or more schoolmates to sign up | $179 struck through |
The LeetCode subscribe page showed the $35 and $159 prices when checked on October 14, 2026, the same figures as its archived pages of February 2024 and February 2025. Confirm before you pay.
What the price tag does not tell you:
- The discount is the price. The struck-through $39 and "previously sold for $299" appear in both the February 2024 and February 2025 snapshots. That is the standing price, not a limited-time sale.
- No refunds, no proration. LeetCode's terms (last modified April 5, 2024) say all fees "are non-refundable" and that it "will not prorate" a subscription ended early. Cancelling keeps access to the end of the period, "but you will not receive a refund".
- Monthly-to-yearly is a bad path. Upgrading credits only the unused part of the current month. Pay monthly for three months, then switch, and only the unused days of the third month count toward the $159 year. Yearly costs about four and a half months of monthly, so a shorter prep window is cheaper on monthly.
- Lapsed means locked. When Premium ends you can still view code you wrote for premium problems, but you cannot run or submit it.
- Free trial: unknown. No page we opened mentions one.
What LeetCode Premium Does Well
The tooling is real. A breakpoint debugger in the editor, autocomplete and priority judging at peak hours make daily practice smoother.
Frequency sorting at big companies. For firms with many tagged problems, sorting by frequency or time turns "practice everything" into a short list to do first. That is the one Premium feature that changes your study plan rather than your comfort. Testimonials on its subscribe page credit LeetCode study with Facebook, Bloomberg and Amazon offers.
Volume and pressure. Premium adds more problems, and the simulations add a clock that solo practice lacks.
Where LeetCode Premium Falls Short
A tag tells you a pattern, not the question. A company tag attaches a company name to a LeetCode problem. It says this problem, or something close, came up there. It does not say how the interviewer framed it or what the follow-up was. Interviewers rarely read a LeetCode title aloud; they wrap the pattern in their own domain, such as shipment ordering or driver payroll.
Coverage thins out fast. A review built on client feedback (Rora) says LeetCode "will often lack company specific questions" for smaller companies. A Blind reply says some tags, Google's among them, are inaccurate or missing. A techinterview.org summary of four r/leetcode threads from October 2025 to August 2026 (checked October 8, 2026) includes a LinkedIn loop where the tagged questions did not show up, and several replies there say free lists such as NeetCode's cover most of what people pay for.
Solution quality varies. The same Rora review says questions and solutions are user-submitted and "aren't good enough to justify purchasing LeetCode Premium".
Support and billing friction. As of March 2026, Trustpilot showed a TrustScore of 2.5 out of 5 from 14 reviews, with one-star complaints about refunds and auto-renewal. As of July 2025, the Better Business Bureau rated LeetCode B, not accredited, with 98 complaints in its reporting window. Disputes go to binding arbitration under California law with a class-action waiver.
LeetCode Premium vs PracHub
| Dimension | LeetCode Premium | PracHub |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A paid layer of tooling, premium problems, company tags and timed simulations | A bank of real, recently asked questions with in-depth written solutions |
| Price | $35 a month or $159 a year (LeetCode subscribe page, October 14, 2026) | Free to start with an optional paid tier (pricing) |
| Free tier | Non-premium problems and articles, judged submissions, contests and the Discuss forum; no company grouping | Most questions are free: more than 8,000 of more than 12,000 as of October 2026 |
| Company signal | Company tags on LeetCode problems, sortable by role, time or frequency | Questions filed by company, more than 550 companies as of October 2026 |
| How a question reads | LeetCode's own problem statement | From candidate reports, keeping the domain story and constraints the interviewer gave |
| Solutions | Official solutions for "a large selection", some premium-only | More than 7,000 questions carry a written solution; many solutions sit in the paid tier |
| Beyond coding rounds | Built for algorithm and data-structure rounds | More than 1,500 system design, more than 1,500 behavioral and more than 700 SQL and data-manipulation questions |
| Refunds | Non-refundable under its terms (April 2024 version) | You can judge it on the free questions before paying anything |
The two are not substitutes. LeetCode Premium is a practice environment; PracHub is a question bank that shows the prompt as candidates say an interviewer gave it. As of October 2026, PracHub has more than 4,000 coding questions and more than 1,200 engineering-fundamentals questions, with more than 1,200 at Meta, more than 850 at Amazon and more than 600 at Google.
The useful pairing is free LeetCode for reps and PracHub for the real framing. Here is what that framing looks like.
Asked at Amazon: Lexicographically Largest Permutation After Sorting One Fixed-Length Window
A shipment-ordering story: sort exactly one fixed-size window, choosing the one that leaves the largest possible order. The "exactly once" rule is the trick, and generic greedy lists rarely show it.
Asked at Rippling: Delivery Driver Payroll Tracker With Accrued, Settled and Unpaid Wage Totals
An in-memory payment tracker for hourly drivers that reports what is owed and what is paid. It is an object-design round, which a frequency sort of puzzle problems rarely prepares you for.
Asked at Applied Intuition: Merge Overlapping Collinear Lane Segments Given as Integer Point Lists
Interval merging dressed as lane geometry: segments are point lists on shared lines. If you have only drilled the textbook version, the geometry hides the pattern.
Who Should Buy LeetCode Premium
Buy it if:
- You have a FAANG-scale onsite in four to eight weeks. One month timed to the onsite is the common pattern in the r/leetcode threads that directory summarised.
- You practice daily and want the debugger, autocomplete and priority judging. Those are real quality-of-life gains.
- You are a student whose school can gather 50 people for the $119 group plan.
Skip it if you are still learning core patterns, your target is a smaller company with a short tag list, your loop is mostly system design or behavioral, or you will not remember to cancel before renewal.
A Smarter Way to Decide Before Paying
- Write down the company and the onsite date.
- Read what that company asked recently. Open that company's questions on PracHub and note the categories. If the loop is mostly non-coding, Premium is the wrong purchase.
- Check the tag list yourself. If the company's tagged list is thin or the tags look stale, a month of Premium buys you little.
- Compare the options side by side. Our LeetCode vs NeetCode vs PracHub guide covers the free list route, and the LeetCode alternatives roundup covers the rest.
- If you buy, buy monthly and set a cancel reminder for a few days before the renewal date.
Practice these on PracHub
Candidate-reported questions in the two categories LeetCode buyers practice most, each free to read. Not every company dresses the pattern up: Lime's interval question here is the textbook version, so drill both.
Coding (Maximize Total Catch Over K Hours From Ponds Whose Yield Drops After Each Hour · Repeatedly Delete Runs of k Adjacent Equal Characters from a String · Combine Overlapping Closed Intervals Into a Sorted Disjoint List); more in the coding questions.
Engineering fundamentals (Detect Security Attacks in Text Logs Using Sliding-Window Rules); more in the engineering fundamentals questions.
For the full set by role, browse software engineer interview questions, or search everything in the PracHub question bank.
Related: LeetCode Pricing (2026)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is LeetCode Premium worth it in 2026?
It is worth it for a candidate with an onsite at a large tech company in the next few weeks, who will use the frequency-sorted company lists and timed Interview Simulations. When checked on October 14, 2026, it costs $35 a month or $159 a year. A new grad still learning patterns should stay on free LeetCode.
What does LeetCode Premium add over free LeetCode?
Free LeetCode gives you the non-premium problems and articles, judged submissions, contest entry and the Discuss forum. Premium adds company-tagged questions sortable by frequency, premium-only problems, premium official solutions, timed company Interview Simulations, a breakpoint debugger, autocomplete, priority judging and extra Ask Leet AI credits.
Are LeetCode Premium company tags accurate?
They show which LeetCode problems a company is associated with, not how the question was asked. The LeetCode pages we could open (live leetcode.com blocked automated checks on October 13, 2026) do not list the tagged companies or explain how a problem earns a tag. A Blind reply says some tags, Google's among them, are inaccurate or missing, and a client-feedback review says smaller companies often lack tagged questions.
Can I get a refund on LeetCode Premium?
Not by right. LeetCode's terms (last modified April 5, 2024) say all fees are non-refundable and early cancellations are not prorated. Both plans auto-renew, so cancel before the renewal date. Some Blind posters say emailing LeetCode support got accidental renewals refunded, but the terms do not promise it.
Should I buy LeetCode Premium monthly or yearly?
Monthly, unless you will practice for five months or more in a row. As of October 2026, the yearly plan costs about as much as four and a half months of monthly billing, and switching from monthly later credits only the unused part of the current month.
What is the best free alternative to LeetCode Premium?
Pair free LeetCode for drilling with PracHub, a bank of real, recently asked interview questions with in-depth written solutions. Most questions are free: more than 8,000 of more than 12,000 as of October 2026, filed by company across more than 550 companies.
Final Verdict
LeetCode Premium is a good practice environment whose "discount" has been the standing price since at least February 2024. The debugger is a genuine convenience, and the frequency sort earns its fee for a few weeks before a big-company onsite. Outside that window, you are paying a non-refundable, auto-renewing subscription for comfort.
Our verdict: stay on free LeetCode for patterns, buy one month only when a large-company onsite is on the calendar, and go yearly only if you will practice for five months straight. For what your target company actually asks, start with PracHub's coding questions.
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