Sudoku puzzles printable at four difficulty levels
The same generator and the same one-solution guarantee at every level — what changes is how much of the grid is filled in when you sit down. Pick the level that suits you and the generator opens with it already set.
Difficulty in sudoku comes down to one number: how many of the 81 cells are given to you at the start. An easy puzzle hands you 38 to 45 and can be solved by scanning alone. An expert puzzle hands you 20 to 24 and will not give up a single cell until the whole board is pencilled in. The four levels below are the same puzzles pared back by different amounts.
Every level is free, every level can be printed one, two, four or six to a page on A4 or US Letter, and every level can carry a full answer key. If you are not sure where to start, medium is the level a newspaper prints midweek and the one most people settle at.
Choose a level
- Printable sudoku — easy38–45 clues · 5–10 minutesAn easy sudoku is not a watered-down puzzle — it is a puzzle where the next move is always findable. Every grid on this page starts with between 38 and 45 clues, which is enough that scanning rows, columns and boxes for the one place a digit can go will carry you from the first cell to the last.
- Printable sudoku — medium30–37 clues · 10–20 minutesMedium is where sudoku stops being a scanning exercise and starts being a puzzle. With 30 to 37 clues on the board, you will clear the obvious cells in the first minute or two and then hit a wall that simple scanning cannot get through.
- Printable sudoku — hard25–29 clues · 20–40 minutesA hard sudoku hands you 25 to 29 clues and expects you to do the rest. Scanning gets you a handful of cells; after that the grid goes quiet, and it stays quiet until you fill in candidates and start working with the relationships between them.
- Printable sudoku — expert20–24 clues · 40 minutes to over an hourExpert puzzles carry 20 to 24 clues, which is close to the floor for a sudoku that still has one answer. The theoretical minimum is 17, and puzzles at that count are rare enough to be catalogued individually; at 20 to 24 the generator can reliably produce grids that are brutally sparse and still perfectly sound.
Other ways to print
If what you need is the solutions as well as the puzzles, the printable sudoku with answers page starts with the answer key switched on and explains how the key is laid out. If you are printing for a group and want to spend less paper, 4 per page sudoku printable covers the denser layouts and what size the grids actually come out.
And if you want to mix levels in a single batch — a warm-up easy grid, a couple of mediums, one hard one at the back — the main generator has a mixed setting that draws a random difficulty for each puzzle in the run.