how many possible rubik's cube combinations are there

The standard 3×3×3 Rubik’s Cube has exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible reachable combinations, which is about 43 quintillion.

Key number and what it means

• The exact count of valid positions is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000, often rounded in words to “about 43 quintillion combinations.”

• These are only the legal states you can reach by turning faces; if you take the cube apart and reassemble pieces arbitrarily, you can create even more “illegal” arrangements.

How that number is calculated

• There are 8 corner pieces that can be permuted and twisted, and 12 edge pieces that can be permuted and flipped; combining these gives a huge raw total.

• Constraints of the cube’s mechanism (like parity and orientation rules) mean only 1 out of every 12 theoretical states is actually reachable, which brings the count down to the 43 quintillion figure.

Fun perspective on the size

• If you tried one new combination every second, it would take far longer than the age of the universe to go through them all.

• Despite this astronomical number, every solvable state of the 3×3×3 cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer using an optimal method, a result sometimes called “God’s Number.”

TL;DR: There are about 43 quintillion possible 3×3×3 Rubik’s Cube combinations, specifically 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 distinct reachable states.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.