One Piece is one of the longest mainline anime running today, having aired 1166 episodes and counting. Its primary characters have grown tremendously in that time, with its audience feeling that even more. Children have grown up watching the series, introducing family, friends, and even children of their own to the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and the Straw Hats. But, much like many popular, long-running anime released in 1999 or its surrounding years, One Piece had to produce non-canon filler episodes or pad its content to give its creator, Eiichiro Oda, space to stay ahead on the manga. The surprising bit is, One Piece is hardly the worst offender.
Weigh these against the other Shonen Big Three anime, such as Naruto: Shippuden’s 41% problem, suddenly, only 8% of One Piece being considered filler suddenly doesn’t feel too bad. Plus, these other shows have since seen the light: Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is sharper than ever thanks to focusing on a glorious finale, and there’s plenty of hope for Boruto’s next anime to follow suit. What’s interesting is that, following One Piece’s momentous shifting to the seasonal model in 2026 for the Elbaph Arc, its filler has stopped dead in its tracks, with the ratio of non-canon to canon episodes thus gradually shifting.
Every Filler Episode Of One Piece
|
Episode # |
Episode/Arc Title |
|
54 – 60 |
Warship Island Arc |
|
98 – 99 |
Enter the Desert Pirates! The Men Who Live Freely!; False Fortitude! Camu, Rebel Soldier at Heart! |
|
102 |
Ruins and Lost Ways! Vivi, Her Friends and the Country’s Form! |
|
131 – 135 |
Post-Alabasta Arc |
|
136 – 138 |
Goat Island Arc |
|
139 – 143 |
Ruluka Island Arc |
|
196 – 206 |
G-8 Arc |
|
220 – 224 |
Ocean’s Dream Arc |
|
225–226 |
Foxy’s Return Arc |
|
279 – 283 |
Mid-Enies Lobby Flashback Mini Arc |
|
291 – 292 |
Boss Luffy Returns! Is It a Dream or Reality? Lottery Ruckus!; A Big Rice Cake Tossing Race at the Castle! Red Nose’s Plot! |
|
303 |
Boss Luffy Is the Culprit? Track Down the Missing Great Cherry Tree! |
|
317 – 319 |
Mid Post-Enies Lobby Side Stories |
|
326 – 336 |
Ice Hunter Arc |
|
382 – 384 |
Spa Island Arc |
|
406 – 407 |
Special Historical Arc |
|
426 – 429 |
Little East Blue Arc |
|
457 – 458 |
A Special Retrospective Before Marineford |
|
492 |
The Strongest Tag-Team! Luffy and Toriko’s Hard Struggle! |
|
542 |
A Team Is Formed! Save Chopper |
|
575 – 578 |
Z’s Ambition Arc |
|
590 |
History’s Strongest Collaboration vs. Glutton of the Sea |
|
626 – 628 |
Caesar Retrieval Arc |
|
747 – 750 |
Silver Mine Arc |
|
780 – 782 |
Marine Rookie Arc |
|
895 – 896 |
Cidre Guild Arc |
|
907 |
20th Anniversary Special! Romance Dawn |
|
1029–1030 |
One Piece Film Red Tie-in Mini Arc |
|
1084 |
Time to Depart – The Land of Wano and the Straw Hats |
Overall, only 97 of One Piece’s 1157 numbered episodes are filler, making only 8% of the series filler. While that might seem a tad high, that’s nothing compared to other big anime from the same time period. 45% of Bleach is filler, while 13% of Dragon Ball Z is filler.
One Piece’s low filler percentage is likely due to Toei Animation introducing smaller filler scenes in canon episodes, meaning they can stretch the material out a bit more than other series. Now, however, it looks like One Piece’s move to a seasonal release schedule could mean that filler episodes are a thing of the past for the anime adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s beloved manga.
One Piece Filler Episodes That Are A Secret Treasure
One particular filler arc after Skypiea exceeded all expectations. Episodes 196–208 feature an arc where the Straw Hats land the damaged Going Merry in the middle of the impenetrable G-8 Marine base. The ship is captured, and many of the Straw Hats go undercover as Marines to find a means of escape.

Every One Piece Arc Ranked From Forgettable To Masterpiece
One Piece is one of the most iconic, beloved, and long-running anime and manga ever. In all of its history, what are the best arcs in the story?
The G-8 filler arc is filled with moments for each member of the Straw Hats to shine, including Sanji’s infectious cooking, Robin’s infiltration skills, Usopp’s lying, and Luffy’s lack of subtlety, creating some of the biggest laughs of the series while telling a compelling story of cat and mouse as the Straw Hat’s avoid total capture.
More Than A Few Of One Piece’s Filler Arcs Are Rough Sailing
Though One Piece undoubtedly has some strong filler arcs and episodes, there are more than a few that just don’t hold up. The Warship Island arc, for example, has the typical hallmarks of a filler arc through things like bad art and an uninteresting story, and it also ruined the pacing by pushing back the Straw Hats’ entrance to the Grand Line.
The Warship Island arc is also infamous for how it goes against One Piece canon by introducing a dragon, as when dragons would be referenced years later, everyone would remark on how they thought dragons were only myths.
Most filler arcs in One Piece don’t fare much better than that. For example, the Silver Mine and Cidre Guild arcs both disrupt canon for mindless action and stories that don’t add anything to the overall narrative, and the Cidre Guild arc is especially infamous for that because of how it comes at the beginning of the Wano arc.
Even more infamous are the Spa Island and Foxy’s Return arcs. Both the Spa Island and Foxy’s Return arcs are infamous for bringing back the incredibly divisive Foxy and doubling down on everything people hated about him, only making him less popular with fans and further fueling the misinterpretation that Foxy isn’t canon to One Piece.
One Piece’s Filler Alternatives Hit A New Low In 2025
While filler episodes can be potentially enjoyable, One Piece fans have a harder time giving recap episodes a pass, and things became more frustrating in 2025 with five recap episodes frequently breaking the 33-episode batch’s momentum. Lovable as the Straw Hats’ crew doctor is, people got rather sick of Dr. Chopper’s Adventure Checkups. It was clearly needed to free up time and resources for the animators, especially with the first recap preceding the incredible beginning to the Kuma flashback. But it also begged the question of why they bothered, serving as a stronger illustration of the seasonal model giving the most organic fix for this problem.
Fans won’t miss this last breath of One Piece filler content, with the anime instead focusing on moving forward. It’s in the final saga, and judging from the discourse surrounding every episode, fans rarely need a full recap of the previous week’s events. But as the lore drops of future Elbaph Arc episodes will undoubtedly send viewers’ heads spinning, it’ll be interesting to see whether the anime slows its pacing in the moments ahead to let audiences process what they see. After all, Elbaph is strongly tied to multiple key players in One Piece’s massive story, and crucially, the first true battleground of its greatest heroes and villains.
One Piece Is All Killer, No Filler In 2026
Despite reasonable nostalgia over some genuinely entertaining original episodes, One Piece’s anime has made a triumphant return in 2026, bringing with it all the incredible adventures and discoveries fans have come to love, minus the filler. The Elbaph Arc has been going great, giving just enough space for positively tantalizing moments of mystery, in exchange for 26-episode seasons. It’s bittersweet that fans will no longer have the weekly promise of new episodes ad infinitum, but the results speak for themselves: it’s sustainably well-animated, and focuses intently on telling Oda’s story.
One Piece is in no danger of ending too soon in the anime, though. Between gearing up for One Piece: Heroines’ adaptation, more of the live-action series, and even a newly-recreated East Blue Saga coming from WIT Studio, every project running lately is focused on their source material and not overstaying their welcomes, not that there’s any danger on that front. One Piece fans will look back fondly on some filler episodes, and those will always be available for a rewatch. But from here on out, it seems it’s smooth sailing for the Straw Hats.
- Release Date
-
October 20, 1999
- Network
-
Fuji TV
- Directors
-
Hiroaki Miyamoto, Konosuke Uda, Junji Shimizu, Satoshi Itō, Munehisa Sakai, Katsumi Tokoro, Yutaka Nakajima, Yoshihiro Ueda, Kenichi Takeshita, Yoko Ikeda, Ryota Nakamura, Hiroyuki Kakudou, Takahiro Imamura, Toshihiro Maeya, Yûji Endô, Nozomu Shishido, Hidehiko Kadota, Sumio Watanabe, Harume Kosaka, Yasuhiro Tanabe, Yukihiko Nakao, Keisuke Onishi, Junichi Fujise, Hiroyuki Satou
-
Mayumi Tanaka
Monkey D. Luffy (voice)
-
Kazuya Nakai
Roronoa Zoro (voice)