Redundant 'else'

Reports redundant else keywords in if—else statements and statement chains.

The else keyword is redundant when all previous branches end with a return, throw, break, or continue statement. In this case, the statements from the else branch can be placed after the if statement, and the else keyword can be removed.

Example:

  if (name == null) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException();
  } else {
      System.out.println(name);
  }

After the quick-fix is applied:

  if (name == null) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException();
  }
  System.out.println(name);

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

ConfusingElseBranch

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Java | Control flow issues

Disable the Report when there are no more statements after the 'if' statement option to ignore cases where the if—else statement is the last statement in a code block.

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Redundant 'else' inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Report when there are no more statements after the 'if' statement: Default value:
Selected

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection ConfusingElseBranch

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025