PSA: You Can Download LEGO Building Instructions For Free

If your family is anything like mine, you own approximately 8 million LEGO pieces. And in those pieces are entire sets that your children once built — princess castles, ice cream shops, Star Wars scenes — that you no longer have the instructions for. Because in my nearly 10 years of motherhood, storing LEGO instructions has been a source of stress. There’s so many of them and once the pieces are all mixed in with your other LEGO boxes, it feels impossible to ever have them rebuild Hagrid’s hut or Cinderella’s carriage. But there’s a new hack in town, and it might be my favorite one ever: LEGO building instructions are now available to download for free from the LEGO website.

And you guys, this is a pretty extensive library of downloads. With the search function, you can type in your LEGO set number you’re looking for (a quick Google search should pull that up for you), or even type in the name of the set and year (if you know it) to find the specific instructions you want. But when I did a quick search of just the word “Cinderella,” 20 results popped up, with instructions for sets from 2012 all the way to brand new 2024 sets. So if you know you have a Disney set or can name at least one character, you can probably find the set you’re looking for.

While playing around with the search function in the library, I was also able to find some LEGO building instructions from as far back as 2005. And a really fun surprise? The LEGO Duplo set instructions are also included, so if you were a person (like me) who bought your toddler a Duplo set before they could really comprehend the “set” building part of it, you’re in major luck here.

Not only is this LEGO resource great for those who had full building sets and lost the books (or had some toddler rip a few pages out, IYKYK), it’s also an amazing option for those who never owned a particular set, but have so many LEGO pieces, they want to try building it with the same shaped bricks that are maybe just in different colors or missing the stickers needed. There are very simple builds available, too, from animals to rockets and cars, and if you want to branch your child’s building skills out, you could easily download several instructions for them to follow with the LEGO bricks they have available.

I also love the idea of finding these instructions when you’ve inherited some older LEGO sets. Imagine passing down a box of bricks from a favorite set and your child being able to build it all over again thanks to these PDFs. Even the Creator Expert guides are available, so I don’t know about you, but I might try to build my own Big Ben out of random pieces. Honestly, this might be the start of a family tradition — each of us picking a random build to try and seeing how far we can get with our own pieces.

Or maybe we’ll just finally finish building the Harry Potter astronomy tower set.