How long did Demon Slayer run?
The dates are exact. Koyoharu Gotouge launched Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump on February 15, 2016, and the series ended in the magazine on May 18, 2020. The 205 chapters were collected in 23 tankobon volumes, released from June 3, 2016 to December 4, 2020, with the 23rd volume closing the set after serialization had already finished. Viz Media published the manga in English. The final chapter, chapter 205, "Life Shining Across the Years," is a modern day epilogue following the descendants and reincarnations of the cast in a world without demons.
Against the magazine's own pillars, that is a short run. Dragon Ball, the Jump benchmark documented elsewhere in this Library, ran 519 chapters in 42 volumes. Demon Slayer tells its complete story in less than half that chapter count, with one continuous plot from Tanjiro's first training to the final battle and its epilogue, and no continuation series under the same title. The brevity later became part of the sales story: a finished set of 23 volumes is a set a new reader, arriving from the anime, can buy whole.
The unusual part is when it stopped. The manga ended in May 2020, in the middle of its record year: Oricon would count 82,345,447 copies sold across 2020, and circulation kept rising after the final chapter, to 150 million in February 2021 and about 220 million by July 2025. Why Gotouge ended the series when she did is a question this page deliberately does not answer. The explanation repeated most often online, concerning her family circumstances, rests on fan reporting and inference rather than a documented statement opened for this page, so it is not printed here as fact. What the record supports is the shape of the run itself: short, complete, and finished at the peak.
Volume 1: where the short run starts
A Jump hit that ends in 205 chapters is the exception the sales charts then rewarded: the complete story stayed in print as a single, finishable set while its audience multiplied.