Field may be 'final'

Reports fields that can be safely made final. All final fields have a value and this value does not change, which can make the code easier to reason about.

To avoid too expensive analysis, this inspection only reports if the field has a private modifier or it is defined in a local or anonymous class. A field can be final if:

It is static and initialized once in its declaration or in one static initializer.
It is non-static and initialized once in its declaration, in one instance initializer or in every constructor

And it is not modified anywhere else.

Example:

  public class Person {
    private String name; // can be final

    Person(String name) {
      this.name = name;
    }

    public String getName() {
      return name;
    }
  }

After the quick-fix is applied:

  public class Person {
    private final String name;

    Person(String name) {
      this.name = name;
    }

    public String getName() {
      return 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.

FieldMayBeFinal

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 | Code style issues

Use the "Annotations" button to modify the list of annotations that assume implicit field write.

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Field may be 'final' inspection, and the reference of their default values.

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 FieldMayBeFinal

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