Provided are an ink jet recording apparatus and an abnormality detection method of an ejector which are capable of performing high-accuracy abnormality detection and suppressing the generation of excessive abnormality detection with respect to a required image quality. An ink jet recording apparatus (10) includes an ink jet head (20C, 20M, 20Y, 20K) having a plurality of ejectors, a medium transport unit (22), a calculation unit (34) that calculates an index value relevant to a droplet ejection amount for each ejector on the basis of printing data, a threshold determination unit (40) that determines a threshold for ejection abnormality determination for each ejector in accordance with the index value, a threshold storage unit (44) that stores the threshold determined for each ejector, and an abnormality determination unit (54) that determines the presence or absence of ejection abnormality by comparing the threshold with a measurement amount for each ejector.