No, you cannot override private methods in Java, private methods are non virtual in Java and access differently than non-private one. Since method overriding can only be done on derived class and private methods are not accessible in subclass, you just can not override them. By the way, one more possibility of overriding private methods in inner class, since private methods are accessible in inner class, and that’s why it is one of the tricky java interview question. Anyway this will also not work because private methods are bonded during compile time and only Type (or Class) is used to locate a private method. For Example in below code where it looks like that nested class is overriding private method, but if you call privateMethod() with a type of super class but object of sub class, it will only execute privateMethod() declared in parent class, which is not exactly method overriding. Had private method overridden that it would have called method from child class. By the way, compiler will not complain, it will treat method with exact same signature in child class as separate method, and this is known as method hiding in Java.