Missing return statement

Reports missing return statements at the end of methods with a non-void return type. The end of method should be reachable by the method's execution flow.

Example:

String foo(int a) {
  if (a > 0) {
    return "more than zero"
  }
} // foo(-1) will return 'null'

int bar(int a) {
  if (a > 0) {
    return a
  }
} // bar(-1) will fall with runtime exception

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.

GroovyMissingReturnStatement

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 | Groovy | Data flow

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 GroovyMissingReturnStatement

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