TacticBarThe short answer: in the 10 September 2026 Lichess database, puzzle g7STS has the highest rating at 3,323. The solver makes four moves. The longest puzzle is iYZlc, which asks the solver to find 17 moves and is rated 2,952.
The five highest-rated puzzles
A puzzle's rating changes as people attempt it, so this is a snapshot rather than a permanent leaderboard. Ratings are useful here because Lichess treats each attempt as a Glicko-2 game between the player and the puzzle.
The leader, g7STS, is a middlegame combination tagged with deflection, sacrifice and skewer. Its four moves are not a quick trick: every reply has to be calculated correctly.
The longest puzzle takes 17 moves
Puzzle iYZlc contains 33 plies after the position is presented: 17 moves by the solver and 16 forced replies. It is a rook ending with an advanced pawn and a quiet move. At 2,952, it is extremely difficult, but still 371 points below the highest-rated puzzle.
Length and difficulty are related, but they are not interchangeable.
Only six puzzles in the entire database require 15 moves or more from the solver. Just one reaches 17.
Most Lichess puzzles are two or three moves
The typical puzzle is much shorter. The mean is 2.31 solver moves and the median is two. More than 97% finish within four.
Two-move puzzles alone account for 3,091,724 positions—just over half of the database. Puzzles of ten moves or more account for 977 positions, or 0.016%.
How I counted the moves
I used the official Lichess puzzle export, last updated 10 September 2026. It contains 6,100,952 rows and is released under CC0.
The first move in each database row is the opponent's move that creates the puzzle position. The second move is the start of the solution. I excluded that setup move, then counted only the solver's alternating moves. This is why a database line containing eight UCI moves is described here as a four-move solution.
Lichess says the positions were extracted from 600 million analysed games and then re-analysed with Stockfish. Generating the set took more than 100 years of CPU time. Ratings, attempts and even the identity of the top puzzle will change, so every number on this page is dated.
Continue through the data
There is more behind the headline: how strongly length predicts rating, which motifs are associated with difficulty, and how puzzle themes change as ratings rise.