How Many Simpsons Episodes Are There?

Why no single number is correct

Every “how many Simpsons episodes” page online states a fixed figure, and every one of them is out of date the moment the next episode airs. The show is still in production — it began broadcasting in December 1989 and reached its 800th episode on 7 December 2025 — so any honest answer needs a timestamp attached. The figure here, 807, is current to February 15, 2026.

The count is also a matter of definition. The Simpsons did not start as a half-hour show at all: it began as short animated sketches on The Tracey Ullman Show in April 1987, two full years before the series premiere. Add the 2007 theatrical film and the growing set of Disney+ exclusive specials, and the “total” can shift by dozens depending on where you draw the line — which is exactly what the counter above lets you do.

The number that keeps climbing

The pace has been remarkably steady. The show hit its 100th episode in 1994 and has passed another hundred roughly every four to five years since — 300th in 2003, 500th in 2012, 700th in 2021, and 800th at the end of 2025. On 2 April 2025, Fox renewed the series through Season 40 in a deal that pushes the projected lifetime total to around 858 episodes.

One wrinkle worth knowing: from Season 37, Fox trimmed the broadcast order from the traditional 22 episodes a year down to 15, while adding a handful of Disney+ exclusive specials on top. So the show is slowing its broadcast cadence even as its overall count keeps rising.

The records behind the number

The reason the count matters at all is what it represents: The Simpsons is the longest-running scripted primetime series in American television history, and the longest-running American sitcom. Along the way it has won dozens of Primetime Emmys, more than thirty Annie Awards, and a Peabody. No scripted show has ever aired more primetime episodes — which is why every hundredth is treated as a milestone in its own right.

How do they make so many episodes?

The obvious guess is that they just watch the news and satirise it. Mostly, they don’t — and they can’t. The animation pipeline takes the better part of a year, so The Simpsons is built to age slowly, not to chase headlines the way South Park (which can turn an episode around in a week) does. Longtime showrunner Al Jean has told the story of a Soviet Union joke that was already out of date by the time the episode aired, because the USSR had ceased to exist in the meantime.

Instead, ideas begin at an annual retreat where writers pitch premises to a brain trust that still includes Matt Groening and James L. Brooks. Jean has said the single hardest part is finding a premise at all — after hundreds of episodes, “the number of stories we haven’t done has decreased.” Real-world articles do spark episodes: executive producer Matt Selman built one around a magazine piece on book-packaging ghostwriters. But the article becomes a human story, not a topical gag.

The current showrunning team frames the core challenge as beating “the Simpsons did it” — finding a fresh angle, or a whole new animation style, on a premise the show has already covered. One recent example: revisiting its classic 1990s union storyline through the lens of the modern gig economy. Every script then passes through a table read and many rounds of rewrites, with at least one of the two plots almost always centred on a Simpson with a genuine emotional core. That formula, more than any headline, is what has kept the machine running for 800-plus episodes.

What the critics say

The critical story of The Simpsons comes in two acts. Its 1990s run — roughly seasons three through nine — is the near-universally agreed “golden age”, and the praise from that era was extraordinary: Time named it the best television series of the 20th century, and the A.V. Club’s Erik Adams later called it “television’s crowning achievement” regardless of format.

The second act is the “it’s not as good as it used to be” critique, which has followed the show for decades. It is a fair complaint about the average episode — but it is also survivorship bias, because we compare hundreds of recent episodes against only the very best of the golden age. And the show keeps answering its critics in numbers: it is still winning awards, and Disney announced it passed a billion hours streamed in 2025. Individual later episodes still draw real acclaim, and classics like “Lisa the Iconoclast” are routinely ranked among the greatest ever made.

Common questions

Related

So the only honest answer is a number with a date stamped on it: 807, and counting. Ask again next Sunday.