At what level should components be declared using the @Bean annotation in Spring?

In Spring, components with the @Bean annotation are declared at the method level inside a class marked as a configuration class (usually annotated with @Configuration).

That is, @Bean is placed above a method that returns an object of a component (bean), and the class itself acts as a container for such methods. This allows Spring to create and manage the lifecycle of these beans.

Example:

@Configuration
public class AppConfig {

    @Bean
    public MyService myService() {
        return new MyServiceImpl();
    }
}

Thus, @Bean is not placed on the class or field, but specifically on methods inside a configuration class.