How do Java method annotations work in conjunction with method overriding?

Copied verbatim from http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/doc/released/adk15notebook/annotations.html#annotation-inheritance:

Annotation Inheritance

It is important to understand the rules relating to inheritance of annotations, as these have a bearing on join point matching based on the presence or absence of annotations.

By default annotations are not inherited. Given the following program

        @MyAnnotation
        class Super {
          @Oneway public void foo() {}
        }

        class Sub extends Super {
          public void foo() {}
        }

Then Sub does not have the MyAnnotation annotation, and Sub.foo() is not an @Oneway method, despite the fact that it overrides Super.foo() which is.

If an annotation type has the meta-annotation @Inherited then an annotation of that type on a class will cause the annotation to be inherited by sub-classes. So, in the example above, if the MyAnnotation type had the @Inherited attribute, then Sub would have the MyAnnotation annotation.

@Inherited annotations are not inherited when used to annotate anything other than a type. A type that implements one or more interfaces never inherits any annotations from the interfaces it implements.

You found your answer already: there is no provision for method-annotation inheritance in the JDK.

But climbing the super-class chain in search of annotated methods is also easy to implement:

/**
 * Climbs the super-class chain to find the first method with the given signature which is
 * annotated with the given annotation.
 *
 * @return A method of the requested signature, applicable to all instances of the given
 *         class, and annotated with the required annotation
 * @throws NoSuchMethodException If no method was found that matches this description
 */
public Method getAnnotatedMethod(Class<? extends Annotation> annotation,
                                 Class c, String methodName, Class... parameterTypes)
        throws NoSuchMethodException {

    Method method = c.getMethod(methodName, parameterTypes);
    if (method.isAnnotationPresent(annotation)) {
        return method;
    }

    return getAnnotatedMethod(annotation, c.getSuperclass(), methodName, parameterTypes);
}

Using Spring Core you can resolve with

AnnotationUtils.java