Restrict space access to certain groups or users in Jira Cloud

Platform Notice: Cloud Only - This article only applies to Atlassian apps on the cloud platform.

Summary

This article applies to company-managed spaces in Jira Cloud.

For team-managed spaces, check out (Jira Software) Team-managed space permissions or (Jira Service Management) Overview of permissions in team-managed service spaces

Jira is often shared by different teams. It's common to restrict space access to certain team members using permission schemes, groups, and space roles.

Solution

Example scenario in Jira

Imagine we have three spaces: Teams in Site (TIS), Human Resources (HR), and Technical Crew (TC).

Our company has departments that align with these spaces as well. Each team should only be able to access its corresponding space.

To achieve this, we'll use space roles and groups, so we'll only need to use one permission scheme.

Create groups if you don't have any

If you already have a group, you can skip this step. If not, you'll need at least one group to assign to our space role later on.

You need to be a site admin to create groups. If you're not a site admin, ask your site admin to set up any groups you need.

To create groups:

  1. Go to ⚙ Jira settings > User management > Groups

  2. Choose Create group, give the group a name and select Create group

  3. Select Add to add people to your group

  4. Add people (you can add multiple at a time) and choose Add user

For our example, we've created three groups, but you can use any group names you wish:

  • Human-Resources

  • Teams-in-Site

  • Technical-Crew

Create a space role

We're going to create a new space role and call it "Browse."

  1. Go to ⚙ Jira settings > System > Space roles

  2. At the bottom of the page, add a Name and Description and choose Add pace role

Add the space role to the Browse Spaces permission

  1. Go to ⚙ Jira settings > Issues > Permission schemes

  2. Find the permissions scheme associated to the relevant space, and select Permissions

  3. Select Edit, choose Space Role, and select the Browse space role we previously created

  4. Select Grant

We now have a permission scheme with the Browse space role configured for the Browse space permission.

If you'd like the users to also have permission to create issues, comments, etc, please be sure to also add the project role to these other permissions on the permission scheme.

Add the groups to the space role

We're now going to add the groups to the appropriate space role to give them access.

Go to the People settings page for each space and add the corresponding group to the Browse space role.

For example, for the Teams in Site space we would:

  1. Go to Space settings > People

  2. Choose Add people

  3. Start typing "Teams-In-Site" then select the group

  4. Choose the Browse Space role and select Add

Now, all users of the Teams-In-Site group have access to the Teams in Site space.

Repeat this for the other spaces, choosing the appropriate group in each space.

Remove unnecessary browse spaces permissions

To help ensure the space will only be visible to the right users, you should remove any other groups and application access from the browse spaces permission.

To grant users access to the space, add them (users or groups) to the space role via Space settings > People.

If you don't remove groups and application access, respectively, any user added to the group or any logged-in user on your site will still be able to access all spaces associated with that permission scheme. If you don't see either on your space's permission scheme, the permission hadn't been granted and you don't need to make this change.

  1. Choose Remove next to the Browse spaces permission

  2. Select any unwanted groups and/or application access

  3. Select Remove

Additional resources

If you need any help implementing this on your site, you can always check our documentation and get in touch with our support team.

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Updated on November 13, 2025

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