USACO 2026 First Contest -- Final Results
The first contest of the USACO 2026 season featured algorithmic programming problems covering a wide range of techniques and levels of difficulty.
A total of 14273 distinct users logged into the contest during its 4-day span. A total of 11896 participants submitted at least one solution, hailing from 100+ different countries. 5147 participants were from the USA, with high levels of participation also from China, Canada, Korea, India, Malaysia, and Singapore.
In total, there were 34135 graded submissions, broken down by language as follows:
21839 C++17 5485 Python-3.6.9 3375 C++11 3163 Java 201 C 72 Python-2.7.17
As a note, we are working on adding support for PyPy to help improve the ability for Python competitors to earn higher scores on more computationally-demanding problems.
Below are the detailed results for each of the platinum, gold, silver, and bronze contests. You will also find solutions and test data for each problem, and by clicking on any problem you can practice re-submitting solutions in "analysis mode". If you are logged in, you will also see your own specific results below alongside the contest(s) you took.
USACO 2026 First Contest, Platinum
The platinum division had 191 total participants, of whom 143 were pre-college students. The platinum contest was somewhat special this time around, with only a small handful of certified results due to the bulk of our competitors starting in the gold division (the only competitors starting in platinum for this contest were 2025 IOI finalists as well as former finalists who performed at a comparable level in the 2025 season). As a result, leaderboards in platinum will be posted starting with the next contest, when we should have a larger set of certified results to compare. The problems on this contest were also apparently quite challenging, with only 2 certified and 15 non-certified scores above 500!
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USACO 2026 First Contest, Gold
The gold division had 1917 total participants, of whom 1242 were pre-college students. All competitors with a certified score of 800 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the platinum division. Details for those promoted will be released after we finish running academic integrity checks on our results. A fairly large number of participants ascended to the platinum division after this contest, which is perhaps not surprising given that many of these individuals had formerly been platinum-level competitors. .
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USACO 2026 First Contest, Silver
The silver division had 3876 total participants, of whom 2802 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 700 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the gold division.
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USACO 2026 First Contest, Bronze
The bronze division had 10377 total participants, of whom 7770 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 700 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the silver division.
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Final Remarks
It is exciting to have our 2026 season underway! As was announced on our homepage, there are some interesting changes this season as we transition our contest structure somewhat --- in particular, this is the first of three online contests, to be followed by a proctored invitational national championship contest for top USA students. Another curveball involved nearly all top participants starting in the gold division instead of platinum. As a result of this change (and as is typical for the first contest of our season) we saw a healthy number of promotions. This is quite impressive, given that the level of difficulty of our problems has certainly not decreased over the years, this contest being no exception.
For those not yet promoted, remember that the more practice you get, the better your algorithmic coding skills will become -- please keep at it! USACO contests are designed to challenge even the very best students, and it can take a good deal of hard work to excel at them. To help you fix any bugs in your code, you can now re-submit your solutions and get feedback from the judging server using "analysis mode".
A large number of people contribute towards the quality and success of USACO contests. Those who helped with this contest include Chongtian Ma, Aakash Gokhale, Melody Yu, Nick Wu, Brian Law, Cici Liu, William Lin, Jichao Qian, Agastya Goel, Rain Jiang, Akshaj Arora, Alex Chen, Alex Liang, Charlie Yang, Benjamin Chen, Larry Xing, Sujay Konda, Eva Zhu, Richard Qi, Bing-Dong Liu, Botao Yuan, Alexander Wang, Rohin Garg, Nelson Huang, and Benjamin Qi. Thanks also to our translators for their help in extending the reach of our contests. Finally, we are exceedingly grateful to our sponsor this season, Citadel, for all they have contributed towards making our program possible!
Happy coding!
- Brian Dean ([email protected])
Professor and Director, School of Computing, Clemson University
Director, USACO