Free Sudoku Puzzles by Difficulty
Most sites rate difficulty with vague stars. Here, every one of our 65,284 puzzles is rated by the hardest solving technique it actually requires, verified by a solver — so an Easy puzzle never ambushes you with an X-Wing, and an Expert puzzle never turns out to be singles all the way down. Read how our difficulty ratings work, drill a specific move on the technique practice pages, take on the hardest puzzles our engine ever made, play the daily puzzle, or print puzzles to solve on paper.
- Easy Sudoku puzzles →
7,771 puzzles · hardest move: Naked Single or Hidden Single
- Medium Sudoku puzzles →
19,657 puzzles · hardest move: Naked Pair or Omission or Naked Triplet or Hidden Pair
- Hard Sudoku puzzles →
12,846 puzzles · hardest move: Hidden Triplet or Naked Quad or Hidden Quad
- Expert Sudoku puzzles →
25,010 puzzles · hardest move: X-Wing or Swordfish
What the four tiers actually mean
Because every puzzle here is graded by the hardest technique it requires rather than by a panel's stopwatch, the tiers translate into concrete statements about what you will have to do:
- Easy — finishable with Naked Singles and Hidden Singles alone. No pencil marks needed; cross-hatching will carry the whole grid.
- Medium — singles will stall at some point, and you will need locked candidates (Omission) or a simple subset such as a Naked Pair to reopen the board.
- Hard — expect several subset deductions, often Hidden Pairs or triplets, and expect to need candidate marks in at least part of the grid.
- Expert — at least one fish pattern is genuinely required, meaning an X-Wing or a Swordfish, on top of everything below it.
Two guarantees follow from grading this way, and both are things ordinary star ratings cannot offer. An Easy puzzle will never ambush you at step forty with a technique its label did not mention, because the label is the technique list. And an Expert puzzle genuinely requires its hardest technique — the puzzle cannot be completed without it, so the practice is real rather than incidental.
Which tier should you play?
The useful signal is not how a tier feels but where you stall. If you finish Medium comfortably but Hard defeats you repeatedly, the missing rung is a specific named pattern, and it is almost always subsets or locked candidates rather than anything exotic. Rather than grinding Hard puzzles until something clicks, identify the technique and drill it directly on the practice pages, where every puzzle is guaranteed to contain it. Then come back.
That loop — stall, name the missing technique, drill it in isolation, return to mixed puzzles — is far faster than solving at your current level and hoping. The guide on getting faster sets out the method, and the learning-order guide gives the sequence worth following.
One caution worth repeating: difficulty is relative to the solver, not absolute. An Expert puzzle is hard precisely because it needs a pattern you have not automated yet, and it becomes an unremarkable Medium once you have. A tier that defeats you is not a verdict on your ability; it is a reading list. The difficulty ratings guide covers why publisher labels are so inconsistent and what they are really measuring.