House M.D.'s eighth and final season contains 22 episodes. Fox broadcast the season during the 2011–2012 television year, ending with the series finale in May 2012.
The final season begins after Gregory House has completed a prison sentence and returns to Princeton-Plainsboro. Its stories introduce and develop changes in the hospital's diagnostic team while continuing the relationships among House, Wilson, and other long-running characters. The season closes with “Everybody Dies.”
Episode counts can be confusing because the show had different totals in different seasons. Season four, for example, was shortened by the 2007–08 writers' strike, while other seasons had longer schedules. The eighth season therefore should not be inferred from a simple average of the series' 177 episodes.
The number 22 refers to scripted episodes in season eight. It does not include “Swan Song,” the retrospective program associated with the finale, and it is separate from the total number of episodes in the entire series.