Meta Hacker Cup
Meta's annual online programming contest for individuals, with a practice round, several online rounds of increasing difficulty and a final for the top competitors. Anyone who meets the official rules can enter, students or not. Meta had not announced a 2026 season by late October 2026, so check the official page before planning around it.
Individual, online rounds
Meta Hacker Cup · Oct 2026
Programme
Career Growth
Meta
Yearly contest, several weeks of rounds
Advanced
Free
Competition
- When
- Usually opens in July, August, September and OctoberRegistration usually opens between July and early October before the first round. No 2026 season was announced as of late October 2026.
- Who can apply
- Individual programmers worldwide who meet the age and country rules in the official terms for that season. You do not need to be a student.
- Where
- Online, global; final for top competitors
Dates move from year to year. Check the official page before you plan around them.
What it is
Meta Hacker Cup (formerly Facebook Hacker Cup) is an individual algorithmic programming contest that has run since 2011. A season usually has a practice round, a qualification round, then Rounds 1, 2 and 3, and a final for the top competitors. Unlike most online judges, Hacker Cup gives you an input file and a time window: you run your own code locally and upload the output together with your source.
In 2025, the organisers announced the season on Codeforces with registration opening on 3 October and rounds starting on 10 October, and added a separate track for AI-assisted solutions alongside the usual human track.
Who can apply
Individuals worldwide who meet the official rules for the season, which set the age limit and excluded countries. You do not need to be a student.
Timeline
Registration has usually opened between July and early October, followed by weekly rounds through October and November. As of late October 2026, Meta had not announced a 2026 season, so treat this as a contest to watch rather than to plan your year around.
How to prepare
- Practise on past Hacker Cup problems, which remain available on the official site with solutions.
- Get used to the input-file format. Test your code against the full input quickly, since the upload window is short.
- Train on Codeforces and AtCoder contests weekly; the difficulty from Round 2 onwards is high.
- Write fast, reliable templates for input parsing, modular arithmetic and graph algorithms.
What you get
Top finishers have historically won cash prizes and T-shirts, and the final is one of the strongest individual contests in the world. Most participants get practice and a rating benchmark rather than prizes, which is still valuable.
Pair it with on Sefism
- Follow the Competitive programming roadmap and its cheat sheet.
- Strengthen fundamentals with the DSA roadmap and the Competitive Programmer's Handbook.
- For team contests, see ICPC and IEEEXtreme.
Best for: strong competitive programmers who want a tough individual contest each autumn.
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