Minimum Depth of Binary Tree

Easy

leetcode· Java· 2026-08-07Problem link ↗

TreeDepth-First SearchBreadth-First SearchBinary Tree

Runtime

2 ms

Beats 95.61%

Memory

82.1 MB

Beats 31.44%

Problem

Given a binary tree, find its minimum depth.

The minimum depth is the number of nodes along the shortest path from the root node down to the nearest leaf node.

Note: A leaf is a node with no children.

Example 1:

Input: root = [3,9,20,null,null,15,7]
Output: 2

Example 2:

Input: root = [2,null,3,null,4,null,5,null,6]
Output: 5

Constraints:

The number of nodes in the tree is in the range [0, 10⁵].
-1000 <= Node.val <= 1000

Solution

Java

import java.util.Queue;
import java.util.LinkedList;

class Solution {
    public int minDepth(TreeNode root) {
        if (root == null) {
            return 0;
        }
        Queue<TreeNode> queue = new LinkedList<>();
        queue.offer(root);
        int depth = 1;
        while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
            int size = queue.size();
            for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) {
                TreeNode curr = queue.poll();
                if (curr.left == null && curr.right == null) {
                    return depth;
                }
                if (curr.left != null) {
                    queue.offer(curr.left);
                }
                if (curr.right != null) {
                    queue.offer(curr.right);
                }
            }
            depth++;
        }
        return depth;
    }
}