“How long should a sudoku take?” is one of the questions I see most often, and most answers online are guesses. Since Ozerlyn launched, the game has recorded the timer of every puzzle played by signed-in players. Between 4 October 2025 and 20 October 2026 that added up to 14,792 started games and 5,204 finished ones from 182 players. This article goes through what those numbers show, including one result that surprised me as the person who built the difficulty levels.
The short answer
- Beginner: about 3:59 minutes
- Easy: about 6:48
- Medium: about 10:55
- Hard and very hard: 21:26 to 23:37
- Expert: about 15:08, but only a quarter of attempts are finished
These are medians: half of the finished games were faster, half were slower.
Solve times by difficulty
| Level | Median time | Middle 50% of solves | Fastest 10% under | Finished games | Players |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | 3:59 | 2:04 – 5:47 | 1:33 | 605 | 71 |
| Easy | 6:48 | 3:23 – 11:39 | 2:22 | 904 | 35 |
| Medium | 10:55 | 7:44 – 17:11 | 5:52 | 1,315 | 61 |
| Hard | 21:26 | 11:19 – 38:28 | 7:35 | 360 | 42 |
| Very hard | 23:37 | 16:09 – 45:42 | 10:37 | 179 | 24 |
| Expert | 15:08 | 9:12 – 24:28 | 6:27 | 1,306 | 51 |
| Daily sudoku | 11:14 | 7:34 – 18:18 | 5:37 | 482 | 32 |
I use the median rather than the average because a handful of very long games, usually a tab left open overnight, would pull an average far away from a normal experience. The “middle 50%” column shows how wide the spread is. On medium, a quarter of finished games took less than 7:44 and a quarter took more than 17:11. Being slower than the median is completely ordinary.
How often people actually finish
| Level | Typical player finishes | Finished with no hints and no mistakes |
|---|---|---|
| Beginner | 67% | 45% |
| Easy | 57% | 40% |
| Medium | 50% | 38% |
| Hard | 37% | 30% |
| Very hard | 28% | 20% |
| Expert | 25% | 10% |
| Daily sudoku | 45% | 9% |
“Typical player finishes” is the median of each player’s own completion rate, counting players with at least three games at that level. An unfinished game can mean many things: closing the page, starting a different puzzle, or simply giving up. Even so, the trend is clear. On beginner, a typical player finishes two out of three puzzles. On expert, it is one in four.
Across all visitors, including people who play without an account, the puzzles were opened 193,430 times and completed 31,805 times. Every page reload counts as an opening, so the real completion rate is higher than the 16% this suggests, but it shows that most opened puzzles are never finished.
The surprise: hard, very hard and expert take about the same time
Looking at the first table, expert (15:08) seems faster than hard (21:26). That comparison is misleading, because different people play different levels. Experienced players tend to stay on expert, while hard attracts more people who are trying to move up.
A fairer test is to compare the same people. For the 16 players who finished at least three hard and three expert puzzles, their typical hard time was about 94% of their expert time. For the 9 players with enough games on both hard and very hard, the times were practically identical. At the lower end the steps are much bigger: the same players needed about three times longer on easy than on beginner, about twice as long on medium as on easy, and about 1.4 times longer on hard than on medium.
So what separates the top three levels is not the clock but whether you finish at all. Expert has the lowest completion rate (25%) and only 10% of expert games are finished without a hint or a mistake. My reading is that expert puzzles usually contain one or two steps that need an advanced technique. If you spot it, the rest of the grid falls quickly; if you don’t, you stop. As the developer, I take this as a clear sign that the top difficulty labels need another look.
If expert puzzles stop you halfway, the techniques that usually unlock them are locked candidates, naked and hidden pairs and X-Wing and Swordfish.
What a hint really costs
| Level | No hints | 1–2 hints | 3 or more hints |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 5:37 | 8:29 | 14:38 |
| Medium | 10:18 | 14:46 | 25:03 |
| Expert | 14:24 | 17:18 | 16:55 |
| Daily sudoku | 11:22 | 10:50 | 11:26 |
On medium, games finished without hints took 10:18, games with one or two hints took 14:46 and games with three or more took 25:03. Be careful with the cause and effect here: a hint does not make you slow. People ask for hints when they are already stuck, so a hint mostly marks the moment a game became difficult. Games with more hints also had more mistakes.
The daily sudoku is the exception: the time is almost the same with or without hints. One possible reason is that daily players often want to keep their streak going and use a hint as soon as they stall, instead of searching for a long time first.
Do you get faster with practice?
Yes, and fairly quickly. For players who finished more than 20 games at a level, I compared their first five games with every game from the 21st onwards:
| Level | First 5 games | From game 21 on | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 8:13 | 6:45 | -18% |
| Medium | 12:30 | 10:42 | -14% |
| Expert | 16:59 | 12:51 | -24% |
| Daily sudoku | 14:31 | 10:53 | -25% |
The improvement is largest where technique matters most: on expert and on the daily puzzle, practised players are about a quarter faster. On beginner there is no improvement at all, because those puzzles are mostly about entering digits, and the speed of your fingers sets the limit.
Many people also come back. 60 players played on at least 10 different days, 32 on at least 30 days and 8 on more than 100 days.
How to use these numbers
- If you finish medium puzzles in under 10:55, you are faster than half of the people who finish them.
- Move up a level once you finish about two out of three puzzles without hints. Speed matters less than consistency.
- If you can do hard but expert keeps stopping you, the gap is a technique, not time. Learn one new technique and try again.
- Do not compare yourself with the fastest 10%. Most of them have played hundreds of games.
How the data was collected, and its limits
- Solve times come only from signed-in players. People who play without an account are included only in the opened and completed totals.
- This is a small group. 182 players is not a scientific sample, and at each level the three most active players account for 30% to 77% of finished games. That is why I also checked the median of each player’s own typical time, so that one very active player counts once. The results are close to the first table: beginner 2:46, easy 6:34, medium 12:26, hard 23:06, very hard 23:34, expert 15:10, daily sudoku 11:12.
- Times under 20 seconds or over 4 hours were left out as recording errors.
- The time is the in-game timer.
- Everyone gets the same daily sudoku on a given day; the other levels draw from a pool of puzzles.
The figures will move as more games are played. If you have a question these numbers could answer, write to me at ozerlyngames@gmail.com.