Climbing Stairs: which companies ask it and how to practise

Climbing Stairs is a Easy problem that 35 companies are reported to ask. This page shows who, how often and how recently, what the question tests, and how to practise it out loud with an interviewer who asks follow-ups. We link to the original problem statement instead of copying it.

Which companies ask Climbing Stairs?

Public company lists attribute Climbing Stairs, a Easy problem, to 35 companies. The most frequent askers are HPE, Rakuten and Accenture. 9 reports are from the last six months. It mainly tests math, dynamic programming and memoization. Use this as a practice guide, not a promise.

Practise this kind of question aloud

Who asks Climbing Stairs

35 companies appear in the public lists for this question. By how often each is reported: HPE (very often), Rakuten (very often), Accenture (very often), Grammarly (very often), Adobe (very often), HSBC (very often), Zoho (very often), AMD (often), Societe Generale (often) and Qualcomm (often), and 25 more. 9 of them were reported in the last six months, Infosys, Bloomberg and Amazon among them.

These are candidate reports collected in public lists, not statements from the companies. They are a good guide to what to practise and a poor guide to what you will be asked: interviewers change questions, and the same company asks different questions by team and level. Last reviewed 25 October 2026.

What Climbing Stairs tests

It is rated Easy, so interviewers expect a correct, complete solution and a clear statement of the time and space cost, often in the first 15 to 20 minutes, with time left for a variation.

Math questions reward finding the formula or the invariant before writing code, and watching for overflow, negatives and zero.

Dynamic programming is solving a problem from the answers to smaller copies of itself. Start with the plain recursion, find the repeated states, then store them; explain what the state means before you write any table.

Memoization caches the result of a call so each state is computed once. Say what the key is and how many keys there can be.

How to practise it

Do not just solve it silently. In a real interview you explain the approach before you code, write while you talk, and defend the solution to follow-ups. Set a timer, say the brute force and its cost first, then improve it, and finish by stating the time and space complexity and two edge cases you tested.

On giveinterview you can take this kind of question as a spoken interview: the AI interviewer opens with the problem, watches you code, asks cross-questions and ends with a scorecard. Your first 3 single-question interviews are free for life, every interview report is free, and a new account also gets 6 welcome credits.

Read the original statement here: https://leetcode.com/problems/climbing-stairs/ (opens the publisher's page). The statement is theirs; we do not reproduce it.

Questions to practise next

If you can solve Climbing Stairs, try these next, chosen because they share its main topic and many of the same companies: Insert Delete GetRandom O(1) (Medium), Add Two Numbers (Medium), Roman to Integer (Easy), Rotate Image (Medium), Integer to Roman (Medium) and Palindrome Number (Easy). Each has its own page in the questions list.

Frequently asked questions

Is Climbing Stairs asked at Amazon?

Amazon appears in the public lists for Climbing Stairs, reported often. Treat that as a reason to practise it, not a promise you will be asked it.

How hard is Climbing Stairs?