Naruto Shippuden Filler List: Every Episode to Skip or Watch
Save 75+ hours with our full Naruto Shippuden filler list for all 500 episodes. 41% is filler, but the best arcs hit hard. 🍥🔥
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Join KaminariNaruto Shippuden is 500 episodes long, and roughly 203 of those episodes have absolutely nothing to do with anything Masashi Kishimoto ever put on a manga page. That's 41% of the entire series. Forty-one percent! If you watched every single filler episode back to back, you'd lose over 75 hours of your life to anime-original side quests, recycled flashbacks, and dream sequences where Tenten becomes the main character (yes, really).
You already know you need a Naruto filler guide. The question is which one to trust, because every guide on the internet gives you a different filler count. Some say 196 episodes. Others say 206. A few just shrug and write "about 200." The numbers never match because there are roughly 50 episodes sitting in a gray zone between canon and filler, and every tracker on the planet draws that line somewhere different.
So here's what you're getting below: the verified episode count with a clear explanation of why the numbers vary across trackers, a full arc-by-arc breakdown with honest verdicts on every single filler stretch, three concrete watch paths depending on how much of your life you want to give Shippuden, and (crucially) the filler arcs that are genuinely too good to skip. Because some of them are. Kakashi's ANBU arc has no business being as good as it is for a filler arc, and we need to talk about it.
The skip list table is right below for anyone mid-binge. If you want the full breakdown, keep scrolling.
Naruto Shippuden Filler by the Numbers
| Stat | Number |
|---|---|
| Total Episodes | 500 |
| Pure Filler Episodes | 203 |
| Mixed Canon/Filler Episodes | ~50 |
| Manga Canon Episodes | ~247 |
| Filler Percentage | 41% |
| Hours of Pure Filler | ~78 |
| Canon-Only Runtime | ~114 hours |
Shippuden aired weekly from February 2007 to March 2017. A full decade of continuous production. Studio Pierrot was burning through manga chapters faster than Kishimoto could draw them, so they did what every long-running shonen studio used to do: write original episodes and pray the audience sticks around until the source material catches up. Sometimes that meant a two-episode detour. Sometimes it meant a 24-episode dream arc wedged between two of the most important canon fights in the entire war saga. The results were... inconsistent.
The numbers in this article follow the AnimeFillerList standard of 203 pure filler. It's the most referenced count across the community, and where other trackers disagree, I've flagged the differences so you can make your own call.
Complete Naruto Shippuden Filler List
Here's every filler arc and standalone Naruto filler episode in Shippuden, organized chronologically. Each one gets an episode range, an episode count, and a straight verdict. If something shows up in the "Worth Your Time" section later in the article, it's flagged here too.
| Arc | Episodes | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Twelve Guardian Ninja | 57-71 | Skip. Solid worldbuilding around the Fire Temple and a pseudo-jinchuriki named Sora, but nothing here connects to anything that happens later. You'll forget this arc existed by the time the Pain arc starts. |
| Three-Tails' Appearance | 91-112 | Skip. The longest filler arc in Shippuden, and it feels every minute of its length. The final episode lands a surprisingly emotional beat if you've gotten attached to the original characters, but asking someone to sit through 22 episodes for one good payoff is a tough sell. |
| Six-Tails Unleashed | 144-151 | Optional. Utakata, the Six-Tails jinchuriki, gets real character development here, and it subtly deepens the emotional weight of the jinchuriki theme right before the Pain invasion begins. At only eight episodes, it won't kill your pacing. Worth a look if you care about the tailed beast hosts as a group. |
| Past Arc: The Locus of Konoha | 176-196 | Skip. Dropping 21 filler episodes directly after the Pain arc is genuinely painful. Most of this content retreads Naruto's childhood and rehashes material from Part 1. If you've already watched the original series, almost nothing here will surprise you. |
| Adventures at Sea (The Boat Arc) | 223-242 | Skip. The infamous boat arc. Twenty episodes of goofy side missions as Naruto sails toward the Fourth Great Ninja War. A handful of comedic episodes have their fans, but most of the community considers this stretch Shippuden's absolute low point. Proceed at your own risk. |
| Flashback: Sasuke and Naruto | 257-260 | Skip. Four episodes recapping Sasuke and Naruto's rivalry. If you've been watching the show, you've already lived through all of this. Twice. |
| Power Arc (Chikara) | 290-295 | Watch. Created to celebrate the franchise hitting 500 combined episodes, and the production team went all out. Movie-quality animation, Kabuto pulling the villain strings, a clone of Nine-Tails Naruto as the final threat. The fights are absolutely gorgeous. Six episodes, clean story, no loose threads. Peak filler. |
| War-Era Side Missions | 303-320 | Skip. Side characters run minor missions while the Fourth Great Ninja War is supposedly raging around them. The return of the Sound Four in episodes 303-305 is a solid nostalgia hit (watching our heroes demolish villains who used to be terrifying is satisfying), but 18 episodes of war-era padding is a lot. |
| Kakashi's ANBU Arc | 349-361 | Watch. The single best filler arc in the Naruto franchise, full stop. I go deeper on this below, but the short version: if you skip every other filler arc on this Naruto Shippuden filler list, keep this one. |
| Mecha Naruto | 376-377 | Optional. A mechanical clone of Naruto attacks the village. It's exactly as ridiculous as it sounds, and it knows it. Love it or skip it, but at two episodes it's essentially free. Solid comic relief between heavy canon episodes. |
| War Filler Block | 389-390, 394-413, 416, 422-423 | Skip. The biggest pacing killer in the entire series. Twenty-four filler episodes scattered across the climax of the war saga. Right when the stakes should be at their absolute highest, you're watching flashbacks and side stories that drain every ounce of momentum. The strongest argument for why filler guides exist. |
| Infinite Tsukuyomi Dreams | 427-450 | Skip. Every major character gets trapped in a dream world and imagines their ideal life. The Tenten dream episodes (427-428) are hilariously awful in a way some fans enjoy ironically. Beyond that, it's 24 episodes of stalling before the finale. The war arc needed a lot of things at this point. Twenty-four dream episodes were not one of them. |
| Childhood Flashbacks | 480-483 | Optional. Quiet, heartwarming stories about young Naruto, young Sasuke, and young Shikamaru. They work beautifully as a soft goodbye to the series if you let them. If you've just finished the final battle and you're feeling emotional, give these four episodes room to breathe. If you're ready for the actual ending, skip to 484. |
Standalone Filler Episodes
A complete Naruto Shippuden filler list also needs to account for the scattered one-off filler episodes that don't belong to any arc:
| Episode | Title | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 170-171 | (Pain arc interruption) | Skip. Filler episodes interrupting the Pain invasion. The single best arc in Shippuden gets paused for two episodes of nothing. Criminal pacing. |
| 271 | Road to Sakura | Skip. Alternate-universe gag episode. Harmless but pointless. |
| 279-281 | White Zetsu war filler | Skip. |
| 284-289 | War-era standalones | Skip. Minor character spotlights during the war. Light on lasting impact. |
Naruto Shippuden Filler Episodes Worth Your Time
Most Shippuden filler episodes are skippable. But "most" is doing serious heavy lifting in that sentence, because a few arcs are genuinely, undeniably excellent. If someone told you to skip every filler episode without exception, they'd be pulling you away from some of the strongest material in the franchise. Should you watch Naruto Shippuden fillers? For these five, absolutely.
1. Kakashi's ANBU Arc (Episodes 349-361)
The best filler arc in either Naruto series, and a lot of fans will tell you it belongs in the conversation for best arc in Shippuden, period. The tone shifts dramatically. Kakashi spirals into an emotionless, mission-obsessed state after losing Rin, cycling through increasingly dark ANBU assignments while Gai, Hiruzen, and others try to pull him back from the edge. You get Yamato's full origin story, a young Itachi joining ANBU as a prodigy who's already carrying the weight of the world, and political maneuvering from Danzo that adds genuine layers to the main story.
Episode 350 is a standout even among standouts. It animates the night of Naruto's birth, Minato and Kushina's deaths, and the Nine-Tails attack with an emotional depth that expands on the canon version. Fans consistently rank it as one of the single best episodes in the entire franchise. Filler label or not, these 13 episodes hit harder than half the canon war arc.
2. Power Arc / Chikara (Episodes 290-295)
Six episodes that look and feel like a Naruto movie. Studio Pierrot built this arc as a celebration of the franchise reaching 500 combined episodes, and they treated it like a prestige project. The sakuga is incredible. Kabuto serves as the antagonist, the stakes escalate quickly, and the whole thing wraps in six clean episodes without overstaying its welcome.
A clone of Four-Tails Naruto powers up into a full Nine-Tails form and nearly consumes the original. A child from the destroyed village breaks through to Naruto at the critical moment. Minato's voice urging his son forward. It packs more genuine emotion into six episodes than some canon arcs manage in twenty.
3. Itachi Shinden: Light and Darkness (Episodes 451-458)
No entry on any filler list generates more debate. These episodes adapt Takashi Yano's official "Itachi Shinden" light novels, which Kishimoto supervised. AnimeFillerList classifies them as mixed canon/filler (not pure filler), and a growing number of fans treat them as functionally canon. You get Itachi's childhood, his years at the Academy, his deepening horror at the Uchiha clan's trajectory, and the full, devastating weight of the choice he eventually makes.
If Itachi matters to you (and for most Shippuden fans, he's the emotional center of the entire series), calling these episodes filler feels wrong. They fill a gap the manga left open, and they do it with source material Kishimoto himself blessed.
4. Mecha Naruto (Episodes 376-377)
Hear me out. Mecha Naruto is stupid. It's proudly, aggressively stupid. A Frankenstein robot version of Naruto chases the real Naruto through the village while his friends get picked off one by one. It is also exactly the comic relief the war arc needs at that exact moment in the story, right when everything is at its darkest and heaviest.
Two episodes. Harmless fun. The kind of filler that earns its place not by being important but by being the breather you didn't know you needed.
5. Childhood Flashbacks (Episodes 480-483)
Easy to dismiss, hard to forget once you've watched them. Four episodes revisiting the childhoods of Naruto, Sasuke, Shikamaru, and others. Young Naruto eating ramen alone. Young Sasuke before the massacre. Young Shikamaru getting dragged into his first responsibility.
After hundreds of hours with these characters, after the final valley, after everything, four episodes of their childhood don't feel like padding. They feel like one last quiet moment before the credits roll. If you're emotional at the end of your watch (and you will be), let these breathe.
The Hot Take: Kakashi's ANBU Arc Belongs in the Canon
Every Shippuden fan has a tier list of the arcs that define the series. Pain is usually at the top. The Itachi truth reveal. Jiraiya's last stand. Naruto vs. Sasuke at the final valley. The arcs that made Shippuden what it is.
Kakashi's ANBU arc (349-361) deserves a seat at that table. The only thing keeping it out of the conversation is the word "filler" next to its name on a fan-maintained spreadsheet.
Kishimoto never fully showed what happened to Kakashi between losing Rin and becoming Team 7's sensei. He left a gap. And the anime didn't just fill that gap; it filled it with some of the most psychologically grounded, emotionally devastating character writing in the entire franchise. Kakashi doesn't unlock a new jutsu. He doesn't win a big fight. He breaks down, loses himself in increasingly violent ANBU missions, and slowly, painfully, finds a reason to keep going. The tone is darker and more mature than anything in the main Shippuden storyline.
If Kishimoto had drawn these chapters himself, nobody would question them for a second. The "filler" label is a technicality. The quality is peak fiction.
Save 75 Hours and Keep the Arcs That Earned It
Shippuden's filler problem is real, but it's completely solvable. Use this Naruto Shippuden filler list as your go-to reference: grab the canon-only path if you want the tightest ride, the balanced path if you want Kishimoto's story plus the filler that genuinely deserves to exist alongside it, or the completionist route if 500 episodes sounds like a good time. (It does, honestly, if you've got the weeks to spare.)
The 203 Naruto filler episodes will always be there if you decide to come back for them. But the canon story Kishimoto wrote stands on its own. Knowing which shippuden filler episodes to skip and which ones earned a place in your watch is the difference between 192 hours and 114 hours, between a bloated marathon and a series that never once loses its momentum.
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FAQ
What episodes of Naruto Shippuden are fillers?
The pure filler episodes are: 28, 57-71, 91-112, 144-151, 170-171, 176-196, 223-242, 257-260, 271, 279-281, 284-295, 303-320, 347-361, 376-377, 389-390, 394-413, 416, 422-423, 427-450, 464-468, and 480-483. That comes to 203 episodes out of 500, based on AnimeFillerList's classifications. Around 50 additional episodes are classified as mixed canon/filler, meaning they contain some canon material alongside anime-original content.
How many fillers are in Naruto Shippuden?
203 pure filler episodes out of 500 total, putting the filler percentage at about 41%. The count varies slightly between trackers (some list 196, others 206) depending on how they classify mixed canon/filler episodes and whether light novel adaptations like Itachi Shinden get labeled as filler or canon-adjacent material.
Should I watch Naruto Shippuden fillers?
Most of them are easy passes. But a handful of filler arcs are genuinely excellent, and skipping them means missing some of the strongest material in the franchise. Kakashi's ANBU arc (349-361) is widely considered one of the best arcs in the series, filler or otherwise. The Power arc (290-295) has movie-quality animation. The Itachi Shinden episodes (451-458) adapt official light novels that deepen one of the most important characters in the story. A balanced approach (skip most, keep the best) gives you the strongest viewing experience.
What is the best Naruto Shippuden filler arc?
Kakashi's ANBU arc, episodes 349 through 361. It tracks Kakashi's psychological descent after losing Rin, features a young Itachi and Yamato's origin story, and carries a noticeably darker tone than anything else in Shippuden. Episode 350 (Minato and Kushina's deaths on the night of Naruto's birth) is one of the highest-rated individual episodes in the franchise. The writing quality rivals the best canon arcs, and many fans argue it should be considered canon outright.
Can I skip all Naruto Shippuden filler and still understand the story?
Yes. The canon story (approximately 297 episodes including mixed canon/filler) is fully self-contained. You won't miss any plot points, character deaths, or major reveals. The one caveat: mixed canon/filler episodes sometimes contain real plot beats wrapped in anime-original padding. Skipping those can create small gaps in context, especially around major arc transitions. The safest approach is to skip only pure filler episodes and watch every mixed episode.
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