SpongeBob SquarePants is an American animated comedy television series created by marine science educator and animator Stephen Hillenburg for Nickelodeon. It first aired as a sneak peek after the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards on May 1, 1999, and officially premiered on July 17, 1999. It chronicles the adventures of SpongeBob SquarePants and his aquatic friends in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom.

Many of the series' ideas originated in The Intertidal Zone, an unpublished educational comic book Hillenburg created in 1989 to teach his students about undersea life. Hillenburg joined Nickelodeon in 1992 as an artist on Rocko's Modern Life. After Rocko was cancelled in 1996, he began developing SpongeBob SquarePants into a television series, and in 1997, a seven-minute pilot was pitched to Nickelodeon. The network's executives wanted SpongeBob to be a child in school, but Hillenburg preferred SpongeBob to be an adult character. He was prepared to abandon the series, but compromised by creating Mrs. Puff and her boating school so SpongeBob could attend school as an adult.

SpongeBob SquarePants has received widespread critical acclaim from television critics, who praised its characters, surreal humor, writing, animation, Hawaiian soundtrack, and music, with the show's first three seasons often referred to as its "golden era". Since then, the series has received criticism for a perceived decline in quality, particularly after Hillenburg departed from the series starting with the show's fourth season. It is considered to be one of the greatest animated series of all time. The series was an immediate hit for Nickelodeon, beating Pokémon as the highest-rated and most viewed animated Saturday Morning program from its premiere onward in 1999. From then onward, SpongeBob continued to be Nickelodeon's highest-rated program, only getting surpassed briefly in viewership several times throughout its run. SpongeBob SquarePants has won a variety of awards including six Annie Awards, eight Golden Reel Awards, four Emmy Awards, two BAFTA Children's Awards, and a record-breaking twenty-one Kids' Choice Awards. The show has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Millennials and Generation Z, becoming ubiquitous with internet culture and spawning many viral internet memes.

The series has ran for fifteen seasons, its fifteenth being confirmed in September 2023, and premiering in July 2024. SpongeBob is the fourth longest-running American animated series in history, and the longest-running American children's animated series as of 2025, surpassing PBS Kids' Arthur. The series' popularity has made it a multimedia franchise, and Paramount Global's most profitable intellectual property. By 2019, it had generated over $13 billion in merchandising revenue. Since its debut, it has inspired four theatrical feature films (starting with The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie in 2004), two feature films for streaming, a Broadway musical, a comic book series, and video games. The series eventually expanded into spin-off series, with a CGI-series Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years and traditionally-animated series The Patrick Star Show both premiering in 2021, while the former ended in July 2024.