Naruto Shippuden Filler List: Every Episode You Can Watch Or Skip

For many anime fans worldwide, one of their greatest long-standing fixations has been on the visual upgrade that was Naruto: Shippuden over its predecessor. The battles became more cinematic, the music sharper, and the animation attained peaks unmatched in the previous Naruto anime or in its Boruto successor. Yet, one major drawback that intimidates viewers wanting to dig into its satisfying 500-episode run is the filler.

Anime filler has become an increasingly antiquated concept in modern viewership terms. Even long-running anime like One Piece have utterly discarded this aspect, as the tides have shifted toward concise seasonal runs rather than weekly episodes aired in perpetuity. This is something the Naruto franchise has never experienced in its mainline anime, with the original 2002 adaptation suffering similar filler bloat.

With 41% of Naruto: Shippuden’s anime as filler, it has produced highly entertaining filler arcs which, while skippable, can be worthwhile to experience its world in greater depth. It can also create forgettable or inane spectacles which, even upon reassessment, account for some of the most laughable Naruto episodes around. But it’s still important to know which Naruto: Shippuden filler episodes are watchable, and which you can skip.

Every Filler Episode of Naruto: Shippuden

And Which Are Worth Skipping

All in all, filler accounts for 206 episodes out of Naruto: Shippuden’s 500 episodes. Though not quite half, that still accounts for 41% of the entire series.

Looking at the list completely, it’s easy to see where the team behind the anime ran into speed bumps when adapting the manga, with the series mostly avoiding filler until around the hundred-episode mark, where things get a bit more dire.

Both Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden are infamous for their filler content, with the original series also having around 40% of its episodes be filler. Luckily, Boruto fares quite a bit better with only 10% of that series being filler.

Why Naruto: Shippuden Has So Many Filler Episodes

Custom image created by Evan D. Mullicane

The biggest reason that Naruto: Shippuden was so reliant on filler is that it was a necessary step to avoid the anime overtaking the manga. When Shippuden was airing, new episodes aired every week with very few exceptions. This means that the staff at Studio Pierrot would frequently need to give the manga a few weeks to complete a story arc or fight.

While this undoubtedly made the anime a bit uneven to watch when it was first airing, it helped ensure that the canon material was a fairly faithful adaptation of Masashi Kishimoto’s manga. Of course, this method of adapting manga is mostly outdated in 2026. Shorter manga runs make it far easier to adapt hits like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen on a seasonal basis. The result is a trade-off. Modern anime are better produced and feature more consistent quality, but are released less frequently than series like Naruto: Shippuden did.

When Boruto’s timeskip is animated, all signs point to it abandoning the weekly release model, possibly meaning the next Naruto anime will abandon filler altogether.

Filler Could Be a Relic in Naruto’s Anime Future

While the saga of Naruto Uzumaki was one plagued with filler, it is now over, with fans fully equipped to see the anime with as much or as little distraction as they choose. But his son, Boruto, has his own set of troubles as laid out most clearly in the events of the next anime to conclude Boruto: Naruto Next Generations and carry into the plot of Two Blue Vortex. Pierrot has aggressively adopted a seasonal model to ease the burden of production on their staff, and max out the quality of episodes for their biggest premium anime. With Black Clover being the latest case in point for the studio’s update model improving season 2 drastically, Boruto is sure to follow, leaving its filler and weekly slate behind.

The biggest positive point to a seasonal model for modern anime fans is that it promises virtually no filler, with the closest thing to that being padding of episodes to flesh out battles or key moments from their corresponding manga panels. Boruto: Two Blue Vortex has had a fairly singular focus in its story to date, with 33 chapters as of April 2026 on top of Naruto Next Generations’ 80 to spell out an enthralling yet terrifying story of the Seventh Hokage’s son, rejected by his village after a mass brainwashing, only to return just as a new Divine Tree threat emerges. It’s all the more encouraging that, in a model that leaves filler in the past, Boruto’s story is as exciting as ever.

Where to Stream Naruto: Shippuden in 2026

All 500 episodes of Naruto: Shippuden are available to stream on Hulu and Crunchyroll. Both services also offer every episode of the original Naruto, Naruto Spin-Off: Rock Lee & His Ninja Pals, and Boruto: Naruto Next Generations. Hulu has both the original Japanese language version and the English dub, making it the best option to stream Shippuden currently.

Unfortunately, though the original Naruto series and a handful of the movies are streaming on Netflix, the streaming giant lacks Shippuden in the United States. Luckily for fans, Naruto: Shippuden is fairly easy to watch in 2026, ensuring that the hit anime franchise remains accessible for new generations to discover.

Release Date

2007 – 2017-00-00

Network

TV Tokyo

Directors

Masaaki Kumagai, Naoki Horiuchi, Kazunori Mizuno, Yuki Kinoshita, Kazuya Iwata, Hiroyoshi Kishikawa, Yusuke Onoda, Hisashi Ishii, Yoshihiro Sugai, Shu Watanabe, Akitaro Daichi, Takuma Suzuki, Kiyoshi Murayama, Tsuneo Tominaga, Kunitoshi Okajima, Kenichi Nishida, Hideki Takayama, Masaharu Watanabe, Akira Shimizu, Ayataka Tanemura, Hiroaki Nishimura, Atsushi Nakagawa, Kentaro Fujita, Masayuki Matsumoto

Writers

Yasuyuki Suzuki, Shin Yoshida, Junki Takegami, Katsuhiko Chiba, Yuka Miyata, Satoru Nishizono, Kento Shimoyama, Daisuke Watanabe, Hideto Tanaka, Masaya Honda

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  Junko Takeuchi

  Naruto Uzumaki (voice)

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  Noriaki Sugiyama

  Sasuke Uchiha (voice)