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In Jira Service Management, you use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) configured by your administrator to help you track how well you're meeting customer expectations (e.g. responding to a request within 4 hours). You can use the time tracking feature in addition to SLAs to generate a workload report when you're working on a customer request with other agents, or when you need to track time spent fixing a problem that affects multiple customer requests.

Jira admins can enable or disable time tracking for their entire Jira site. They can also control who has permission to log time. If you don’t see the time tracking field in your project, contact your Jira admin for help. Read more about configuring time tracking.

Here's how time tracking appears on an issue:

  • The Estimated field displays the amount of time originally anticipated to resolve the issue
  • The Remaining field displays the amount of time currently anticipated to resolve the issue 
  • The Logged field displays the amount of time logged working on the issue so far
  • Choosing to include subtasks displays the aggregated time of an issue and all its subtasks

When you log time for the first time, the time spent is subtracted from the original estimate, and the resulting value is shown in the remaining estimate. When you log subsequent time, any time spent is subtracted from the remaining estimate.

If you have more than 100 child issues on an issue, you won't be able to include them in time tracking. We recommend limiting the number of child issues per issue to 100. Learn more about parent and child issues.

Before you begin

Make sure that your Jira admin has enabled time tracking, and that you have the Work on IssuesDelete Work Logs, and Edit Work Logs project permissions. Anyone with the Browse Project permission can view time tracking info on an issue.

Set an original time estimate for an issue

Before you start work on an issue, you can set an original time estimate to calculate how long you believe it'll take to resolve it.

  1. Select the issue and choose the Original estimate field
  2. Enter the amount of time you believe it'll take to complete work on the issue

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Tips:

  • You can specify additional time units after a time value 'X', such as Xw, Xd, Xh, or Xm, to represent weeks (w), days (d), hours (h), and minutes (m), respectively. If you type a number without specifying a time unit—you type "2" instead of "2h"—the default time unit that your Jira admin has specified will apply.
  • Default conversion rates are 1w = 5d and 1d = 8h.

Log time on an issue

Once you've started to work on a specific issue, log time to keep a record of it. This will let you compare your original estimate with how long it actually took to resolve the issue.

  1. Open the issue and select ••• > Log work (or click on the time tracking field)
  2. Fill in the Log time fields and select Save


Edit a time log entry

You can edit your own time log entries if you've been granted the edit own work logs permission. You can also edit other people's time log entries if you've been granted the Edit All Work Logs permission.

  1. Open an issue and choose Work log in the activity section at the bottom of the issue.
  2. Find the time log entry and choose Edit.
  3. Complete any relevant fields and choose Save.


When editing or deleting a time log entry, the values that were entered before editing or deleted are still considered and used in the time remaining value. If the time remaining isn't what you expect, manually update it in the Edit work log modal.

Delete a time log entry

You can delete your own time log entries if you have been granted the Delete Own Work Logs permission. You can also delete other people's time log entries if you've been granted the Delete All Work Logs permission.

  1. Open an issue and choose Work log in the activity section at the bottom of the issue.
  2. Find the work log entry and choose Delete.

You'll be asked whether you'd like to adjust the remaining time estimate. If you choose to adjust it, you can let Jira automatically adjust the time remaining by adding back the deleted time or set it to another time manually.

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You can perform this action with your keyboard via Jira’s command palette. Use command + K (for Mac) or Ctrl + K (for Windows) to open the command palette while you’re in Jira. Learn more about Jira’s command palette