'protected' member in 'final' class

Reports protected members in finalclasses.

Since final classes cannot be inherited, marking the method as protected may be confusing. It is better to declare such members as private or package-visible instead.

Example:

record Bar(int a, int b) {
  protected int sum() { 
     return a + b;
  }
}

After the quick-fix is applied:

record Bar(int a, int b) {
  int sum() { 
     return a + b;
  }
}

As shown in the example, a class can be marked as final explicitly or implicitly.

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.

ProtectedMemberInFinalClass

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 | Declaration redundancy

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 ProtectedMemberInFinalClass

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