Floor arrangement
Floor puzzle reasoning questions — free, machine-verified practice
Floor puzzle reasoning questions place people on the floors of a building, one per floor, and give clues about who lives above, below, or a fixed number of floors apart. Number the floors first, place every clue that fixes an exact floor, then treat gap clues as rigid blocks that slide until only one position survives. The finished arrangement is always unique.
Floor puzzles are the arrangement family banking papers return to most reliably after linear seating, and they are the one aspirants most often abandon halfway. The reason is almost never the logic — it is that a floor puzzle rewards writing the grid down and punishes solving it in your head, because a single misread gap silently invalidates everything built on top of it.
How to solve floor puzzle reasoning questions without backtracking
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Draw the floors top-down, and number them
Write floor 1 at the bottom and the top floor at the top, exactly as the building stands. Almost every wasted minute on a floor puzzle traces back to reading “above” as “higher row number” on a grid drawn upside down. Number the floors explicitly — do not rely on position alone.
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Place the absolute clues before anything else
“C lives on the topmost floor” or “A lives on floor 2” fixes a person outright. These cost nothing to apply and every one of them shrinks the search. Apply all of them before you touch a single relative clue.
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Treat a gap clue as one rigid block
“There are exactly two floors between A and B” means the pair A–?–?–B moves as a single object of height four. List every position that block can occupy in the building; usually two or three fit. That list, not a guess, is your branching point.
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Branch on the most constrained block, never the first one
If one block fits three ways and another fits two, branch on the two. Each branch is a complete trial arrangement you either finish or kill. Working from the tightest constraint typically halves the casework.
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Verify against the full clue list before answering
When a grid is complete, walk the clue list from the top and confirm each one against the finished building. A floor puzzle can satisfy every clue you remembered and still break one you stopped tracking after step two — and the questions are set to catch exactly that.
What each floor clue phrasing actually constrains
What each floor clue phrasing actually constrains
| Clue wording | What it fixes |
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| A lives immediately above B | A = B + 1. A rigid pair, no gap, order fixed |
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| There are two floors between A and B | |A − B| = 3. Either may be higher — two orientations |
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| A lives above B | A > B only. No distance at all — the weakest clue in the set |
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| Only two people live above A | A is fixed absolutely: the third floor from the top |
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| A and B live on consecutive floors | |A − B| = 1, either order — not “A above B” |
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| A lives on an even-numbered floor | Halves the candidates instantly; apply it early |
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Practise floor puzzle reasoning questions right now
Every question below was generated by the same engine that mints the Deduce daily puzzle, and machine-proven to have exactly one correct answer before it reached this page. The walkthrough is the engine's own, step for step.
Question 1
5 people live in a 5-storey building, one person on each floor — floor 1 is the ground floor and floor 5 is the top.
- There is exactly 1 floor between Deepak and Isha.
- Yash lives on the topmost floor.
- Isha lives on a floor somewhere above Lata.
- Isha lives on the floor immediately above Aditi.
Can you work out who lives on each floor?
Show the worked solution
- Start: 120 possible arrangements of 5 people.
- Clue 2 — "Yash lives on the topmost floor." ⇒ Yash → floor 5 (24 possibilities left).
- Clue 4 — "Isha lives on the floor immediately above Aditi." narrows it to 6 possibilities.
- Clue 1 — "There is exactly 1 floor between Deepak and Isha." narrows it to 3 possibilities.
- Clue 3 — "Isha lives on a floor somewhere above Lata." ⇒ Deepak → floor 2, Aditi → floor 3, Lata → floor 1, Isha → floor 4 (1 possibility left).
- Exactly one arrangement survives every clue — that is the answer.
Question 2
5 people live in a 5-storey building, one person on each floor — floor 1 is the ground floor and floor 5 is the top.
- Arjun lives on the lowest floor.
- Deepak lives on the floor immediately above Isha.
- There are exactly 2 floors between Isha and Priya.
- Imran lives on a floor somewhere above Isha.
Can you work out who lives on each floor?
Show the worked solution
- Start: 120 possible arrangements of 5 people.
- Clue 1 — "Arjun lives on the lowest floor." ⇒ Arjun → floor 1 (24 possibilities left).
- Clue 2 — "Deepak lives on the floor immediately above Isha." narrows it to 6 possibilities.
- Clue 3 — "There are exactly 2 floors between Isha and Priya." ⇒ Imran → floor 4, Isha → floor 2, Deepak → floor 3, Priya → floor 5 (1 possibility left).
- Exactly one arrangement survives every clue — that is the answer.
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Common mistakes
Reading “two floors between” as “two floors apart”
“Two floors between A and B” leaves two empty floors in the gap, so the difference is three, not two. This single misreading is the most common way an otherwise correct floor puzzle collapses, and the wrong options are usually built to reward it.
Fixing an orientation the clue never gave
“There are three floors between A and B” does not say A is higher. Unless another clue settles it, both orientations stay alive and both must be carried until one dies. Committing early feels faster and is how a solvable puzzle becomes unsolvable.
Never re-checking the early clues
Clues applied in the first minute stop being consciously tracked. Before answering, re-read every clue against the completed grid. A puzzle that satisfies eight of nine clues scores zero, exactly like one you never started.
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FAQ
What does “two floors between A and B” mean in a floor puzzle?
It means two whole floors sit empty between them, so the floor numbers differ by three — not two. If A is on floor 2, B is on floor 5, or the reverse. Compare “A lives two floors above B”, which does mean a difference of two and also fixes which of them is higher. The two phrasings are different clues and confusing them is the single most expensive error in this topic.
What does “consecutive floors” mean?
Two people on consecutive floors live one floor apart, with nothing between them — the difference is exactly one. Importantly, it does not say who is higher. Unless another clue settles the order, both arrangements stay possible and you must carry both until one is eliminated.
How many floors do bank exam floor puzzles usually have?
Five, six, seven or eight, with one person per floor. Six and seven are the most common in IBPS and SBI prelims. A larger building is not harder in itself — what raises difficulty is the ratio of vague relative clues to absolute ones, because vague clues force casework.
Should I start from the top floor or the bottom?
Neither by default. Start wherever the clues are most concentrated: if two clues mention the topmost floor, start there. The habit worth building is starting from the strongest constraint rather than a fixed end of the building, because that is what minimises branching.
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