September 2026 gave Poople thirty daily word ladders, from #383 NAPS on September 1 to #412 GAGE on September 30. Between them, they were solved 50,837 times. This report goes through those solves: how close they came to par, how long they took, which puzzles were hardest and easiest, and what the hard ones had in common.
The short version: about three in ten solves matched par exactly, the median solve took about a minute and a half, and three of the four hardest puzzles of the month shared the same bottleneck word.
September at a Glance
| Measure | September 2026 |
|---|---|
| Daily puzzles | 30 (#383 to #412) |
| Recorded solves | 50,837 |
| Solves that matched par | 30.8% |
| Solves within one step of par | 48.3% |
| Median steps over par | 2 |
| Median solve time | 1 minute 36 seconds |
| Solves finished in under a minute | 35.1% |
| Hardest puzzle | #404 WHEN, 2.7% on par |
| Easiest puzzle | #399 DUTY, 85.7% on par |
Every solve figure on this page comes from finished daily puzzles: counts, shares, medians and other percentiles. Facts about neighbors and routes come from the game’s dictionary. How the solve data is collected, and what it leaves out, is covered in How We Collect These Numbers.
How Many Steps Over Par
Par is the fewest possible steps from the start word to POOP, so matching it means you found a shortest ladder. If the idea is new to you, what is a word ladder walks through the rules with examples.
Matching par was the single most common result, at 30.8% of solves. Another 17.5% finished one step over, so nearly half of all September solves came within a step of the best possible ladder. The median solve finished two steps over.
The right end of the chart is where the interesting misses live. 7.5% of solves took ten or more extra steps. A ladder that long probably started with a wrong turn, into a part of the word graph that looks close to POOP and is not, followed by a long walk back out. The strategy guide shows how to avoid that by working backward from POOP and planning a bridge word.
How Long a Daily Ladder Takes
The clock starts at your first keypress and stops at the winning word.
The median September solve took 1 minute 36 seconds. A quarter of solves were done within 43 seconds, and 35.1% inside a minute. The tail runs long: 90% of solves were finished by 7 minutes 11 seconds, and 5.9% of solves with a recorded time ran past ten minutes.
Puzzle to puzzle, the median ranged from 51 seconds for #386 RACK to 4 minutes 24 seconds for #388 ITCH, the month’s longest ladder at par 10.
The Hardest Puzzle: WHEN
Only 79 of the 2,873 solves of #404 WHEN matched its par of six, which is 2.7%. The most common result was one step over, at 977 solves.
The reason is visible in the word graph. WHEN has six neighbors, words one letter away. Four of them (THEN, WHEE, WHET and WHEY) are exactly as far from POOP as WHEN is, and WREN is further. The only neighbor that moves closer is WHEW, an exclamation that is easy to overlook as a move. From WHEW, the only step forward is CHEW. The whole ladder runs WHEN, WHEW, CHEW, CHOW, CHOP, COOP, POOP, and it is the only six-step route that exists.
That panel is what WHEN’s answer page shows. Its total, 2,870, is three lower than ours because the answer page takes its snapshot when the next puzzle goes live, and three more solves were recorded after that moment.
POME, the Word Behind Three Hard Puzzles
The next three hardest puzzles were #397 RISK at 6.5% on par, #409 RISE at 8.1% and #391 HYPE at 10.9%. They share a bottleneck: every shortest route from all three passes through POME, a botanical word for fruit like apples and pears.
RISK and RISE both run through ROSE and then POSE. POSE is where the trap sits. Four of its neighbors, POKE, POLE, POPE and PORE, keep the P and the O in place and look like progress. None of them is any closer to POOP than POSE. Only POME is, and from POME the ladder finishes POMP, POOP. HYPE gets there through HOPE and then HOME or POPE, and lands on POME the same way.
If you only remember one word from this report, make it POME. The word ladder solver lists up to 20 shortest routes for any start word, so you can check where else it turns up. POME sits on 9 of the 23 shortest routes for GAGE, for example, and GAGE played easily, at 42.7% on par, with plenty of routes that avoid it.
The Easiest Puzzles
The easiest puzzle of the month was #399 DUTY, with 85.7% of solves on par. DUTY has exactly one neighbor in the dictionary, DULY, and DULY has exactly one way forward, DULL. The first two moves are forced, and from DULL either DOLL or PULL leads to POLL, then POOL.
DUTY also had the second-highest median count of invalid entries in the month, seven per solve, behind only ITCH at nine. An invalid entry is a word the game rejects, either because it is not in the word list or because it is more than one letter away. A likely explanation: with only one valid first move, many solves spent several rejected tries finding DULY, and after that the ladder was hard to get wrong.
#406 TRAY was second, at 69.4% on par, and it was also the most-solved puzzle of the month, with 5,396 solves. It is easy for the opposite reason. Five of TRAY’s nine neighbors move closer to POOP, and there are ten different shortest ladders, so almost any sensible first move works. #393 FUND came third at 43.7%.
Longer Par Did Not Predict a Harder Puzzle
Here is every September puzzle ranked by how often solves matched par, with par shown by color and the number of distinct shortest routes in the right-hand column.
Par 5 puzzles turn up at both ends of the list. The longest ladder of the month, ITCH at par 10, landed in the middle at 25.7%, because its first move is close to forced: ETCH is the only neighbor that moves forward. #394 AHEM, at par 8, has only one neighbor of any kind, THEM, so its first move is forced too, and it finished at 21.4%.
Across the thirty puzzles, par showed no relationship with the on-par rate in this sample, a rank correlation of about zero. The number of shortest routes did better, at 0.39: puzzles with fewer routes tended to be harder. Five of the six hardest puzzles had exactly one route. Some one-route puzzles played easily, though, like #389 GIST and #395 PAID at 31% and 32%, so a single route matters most when the word you need is an uncommon one. Thirty puzzles is a small sample, and one month is not enough to call this a rule. Later reports will show whether it holds.
For how par is calculated in the first place, see how we built Poople.
Two quieter traps are worth naming. On #383 NAPS the tempting move is PAPS: it puts a P in front, yet it is no closer to POOP than NAPS. The step that works is CAPS. On #387 TINS the same thing happens with PINS, where TONS is the move that counts.
When September Solves Happened
Solves held steady through the first three weeks of the month, at a median of 917 per puzzle, then stepped up on September 22 to a median of 3,332 per puzzle for the rest of the month.
A new puzzle goes live at 4am Eastern, and the hours on either side of that release are the quietest of the day. Solving builds through the morning and peaks at noon Eastern, then holds up well into the evening. The September 22 row stands out because that day’s increase arrived in the evening.
Time of day made little difference to results. Pooled across the month, the on-par rate for every hour of the day stayed between 25% and 33%.
How We Collect These Numbers
When you finish the daily puzzle, the game sends one anonymous result with six fields: the puzzle number, how many moves you used, the par, how many moves over par, how many invalid entries, and the time from your first keypress to your solve. It carries no IP address, account, cookie or device details. Unlimited games are never sent. The privacy policy lists the fields in full.
This is the panel you see after each daily solve. It compares your result with everyone else’s, and the switch at the bottom turns sharing off. It is on by default, and you still see everyone’s numbers with it off. In the screenshot, taken on a later puzzle, it is switched off, because it was a test solve and we did not want it counted.
Three consequences of collecting data this way are worth stating plainly:
- Every count is a count of solves. With no identifier, there is no way to tell how many different people the 50,837 solves came from.
- Unfinished games are not here. Only finished puzzles are recorded, so these numbers describe games that reached POOP.
- We report medians. Anyone can send a result, so a handful of made-up numbers could drag a mean around. A median barely moves when a few values are extreme, which makes the median a common choice for data that may contain bad values.
We also screened the month for signs of fake submissions, such as bursts of identical records. Nothing stood out: fewer than one record in a hundred matched another exactly, and the busiest single minute for any puzzle held 13 solves.
Bigger daily puzzle makers publish totals like these too. New York Times Games, for example, shared its 2025 totals with TODAY, including 4.2 billion Wordle solves.
Try October’s Puzzles
A new ladder goes live every day at 08:00 UTC on Poople. If September’s numbers make you want more practice, Poople Unlimited serves random puzzles on demand without touching your streak, and these 15 word ladder puzzles with answers run from easy to hard. Every past puzzle and its shortest solution is in the answer archive.
The October report follows early next month, once all of October’s puzzles are in.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the hardest Poople puzzle in September 2026?
#404 WHEN, on September 22. Only 2.7% of its 2,873 solves matched par. Its only shortest route starts with WHEW, an easy word to overlook.
How long does a daily Poople puzzle take?
In September 2026 the median solve took 1 minute 36 seconds from the first keypress. A quarter of solves were done within 43 seconds, and 90% were done by 7 minutes 11 seconds.
How often does a Poople solve match par?
30.8% of September 2026 solves matched par exactly, and 48.3% finished within one step of it. The rate varies a lot by puzzle, from 2.7% on WHEN to 85.7% on DUTY.
Does Poople collect data about me?
No personal data. A finished daily puzzle sends six anonymous numbers with no IP address, account or device information, and a switch on the results screen turns it off. Unlimited games are never sent.