The potential antiproton excess in the AMS-02 data is of much interest and can probably come from dark matter annihilations. Based on the effective field theory approach, in this work we investigate the compatibility of the DM interpretation of the AMS-02 antiproton excess and the null results from direct detection experiments, LUX, PandaX-II, and XENON1T. We focus on dimension-five and -six operators with fermion DM. Only one of dimension-five and one of dimension-six operators can successfully account for the antiproton excess, while the rest either are excluded by direct detection or require very small cut-off scales which invalidate the effective field theory approach.