What order should you do Khan Academy math in?

The straight answer

For self-learners, use the subject courses, not the grade levels, and take them in this order. The names below are the ones on Khan Academy’s own course list, including the two places where it offers you two versions of the same step.

1. Arithmetic
2. Pre-algebra
3. Algebra 1
4. Geometry
5. Algebra 2
6. Trigonometry
7. Precalculus. Khan also has AP Precalculus, added in 2026 and built around the AP exam. Unless you are sitting that exam, take the plain Precalculus course: it ranges wider, into complex numbers, vectors, conic sections, series and probability.
8. Calculus, as either AP/College Calculus AB then BC, or Differential Calculus then Integral Calculus. Both pairs cover single-variable calculus, split two ways. Pick one pair and never do both.
9. Then Multivariable calculus, Differential equations and Linear algebra, in whichever order your goal needs (more on that below).

Statistics is a branch line: any time after Algebra 2. Geometry and Algebra 2 are loosely coupled and can swap. That list is the answer to the question as asked.

The grade-level courses exist for students tracking a school year, and they interleave topics to match classroom pacing. For an independent learner they scatter the dependency chain, which is why the two-tracks structure confuses everyone: it is two answers to two different questions, presented side by side without saying so.

The third shelf, and the integrated-maths fork

Two more sources of confusion, while we are here. Beyond the grade levels and the subject courses sits a third shelf: the Get Ready courses, which cover only the prerequisite skills for the grade they name, plus a newer set of Math Essentials courses spanning grade 3 to precalculus. Those are useful as a quick top-up before starting a subject course and misleading as a starting point, because they are scoped to a school year rather than to you. The other fork is Integrated Math 1, 2 and 3, which sit alongside Algebra 1, Geometry and Algebra 2 and cover broadly the same material in a different arrangement. Pick one convention and stay inside it. Mixing the traditional and integrated tracks is how people end up doing quadratics twice and circle theorems never.

Where the sequence genuinely bites

Most of the order is soft. Two joints are not. The first is fractions and negative numbers into algebra: every step of solving an equation is fraction arithmetic with letters in it, so a weakness there never presents itself as a fraction problem, it presents as being bad at algebra. The second is trigonometry and function transformations into calculus: the derivatives of sine and cosine, and every integral wanting a trigonometric substitution, assume the unit circle and the identities are automatic rather than looked up. If you are going to be strict about prerequisites anywhere, be strict at those two joints and relaxed everywhere else. Swapping Geometry and Algebra 2, or leaving Statistics until much later, costs you close to nothing by comparison.

The question under the question

But notice what you are really asking. “What order?” is a question about dependencies: what needs to come before what. The honest, slightly uncomfortable truth is that a course list is a very blunt answer to it. Algebra 1 is not one thing; it is dozens of concepts, and you probably know a scattered majority of them already. A course-level order forces an all-or-nothing decision on material that is patchy by nature. That is why “where do I start?” follows “what order?” in every thread: the course list cannot answer it.

How to place yourself (with or without us)

If you want to stay entirely inside Khan Academy: work backwards. Open the most advanced course you might plausibly know, take its unit tests cold, and drop down one course each time the wheels come off. It works, at the cost of an afternoon and some morale. The faster route is a diagnostic built for exactly this: measure across the whole dependency map at once, find the frontier where your knowledge actually ends, and start there. That is what a concept-level map of mathematics is for, and it is the gap-analysis test that, famously, the TED talk promised and the site never shipped.

Past calculus, the line stops being a line

The course list keeps going: Statistics and probability, Linear algebra, Multivariable calculus, Differential equations. What changes is that these stop forming a single chain. Multivariable calculus and differential equations both stand on single-variable calculus and can be taken in either order. Linear algebra needs surprisingly little calculus and can be started far earlier than most people assume, which matters a great deal if your reason for all of this is machine learning or economics rather than physics. Statistics branches off after Algebra 2 and never rejoins. If your destination is one of these four, the honest advice is to stop treating the course list as a ladder, look up what your target course actually stands on, and take only that.

Whatever order you pick, plan for the forgetting

One more thing the course list will not tell you: sequence solves which thing to learn next, not whether last month’s learning is still there. Working through courses linearly means the early material is quietly dissolving while you climb, which is how people reach Calculus with rusty Algebra. Pair whatever order you choose with scheduled review that runs itself, and if you are wondering whether the lessons themselves will be enough, we wrote an honest answer to that too. And if what you are really weighing is a different tool altogether, our comparisons of the Khan Academy alternative and the Math Academy alternative are the honest version of that conversation.