How do Jira permissions work?

This page describes the different types of permissions and access rights that can be set up in Jira applications.

You can't edit project permissions or roles on the Free plan for Jira Software or Jira Work Management, and you can't configure issue-level security on any Free plan (including Jira Service Management). Find out more about how project permissions work in Free plans. To take advantage of Jira's powerful project permission management features, upgrade your plan.

What are permissions?

Permissions are settings within Jira applications that control what users within those applications can see and do. All Jira applications allow a variety of permissions: from whether users can create new projects to whether a user can see a specific type of comment on an issue. These permissions can differ between applications.

Types of permissions

There are three types of permissions in Jira applications, and they range from the high-level to granular: 

• Global permissions - These apply to applications as a whole, not individual projects (for example, whether users can see the other users in the application).

• Project permissions - Organized into permission schemes, these apply to projects (e.g. who can see the project's issues, create, edit and assign them). While project admins can assign users to a project, they can't customize the permission schemes for a project. There are lots of project-level permissions you can set to control what users can do within a project.

• Issue security permissions - Organized into security schemes, these allow the visibility of individual issues to be adjusted (within the bounds of the project's permissions). For example, issue security permissions can let you set up types of issues that can only be seen by project admins or users in specific groups.

How do permissions get assigned?

Permissions can be assigned to groups or to project roles/and or issue roles. This diagram illustrates how permissions are assigned to users:

Who can set permissions?