How to see time in status in Jira

“How long has this been in review?” is a question Jira can answer, but not anywhere you can easily use. This page shows the native options, their limits, and how to get the number into JQL.

What Jira gives you

The issue history. Every status change is in the changelog, with timestamps. You can read it per issue, one issue at a time. There is no aggregation and no field to filter on.

Control chart (boards). Scrum and Kanban boards have a control chart showing cycle and lead time. It is a report, not a value on the issue — you cannot filter a board by it, and it counts wall-clock time.

Automation. A Jira automation rule can stamp a custom field when a status changes. This works and costs nothing, with two caveats: it starts from the day you build it (no history), and you are maintaining a rule per transition.

Why wall-clock time misleads

An issue raised Friday at 16:00 and picked up Monday at 10:00 shows 66 hours in “To Do”. The team was away for 64 of them. Report that number to a stakeholder and the conversation is about the weekend rather than the work. Counting only working hours turns it into 2 hours — the number people actually mean.

Getting it into JQL

The reason this matters: a value you cannot filter on is a value nobody uses. What you want is “days in current status” as a real field, so a board can show stuck more than five days and a filter can find them.

Statusdesk does exactly that:

  1. Create three custom fields in Jira (number, number, short text) and add them to your screens.
  2. Paste their ids into the Statusdesk admin page and turn working hours on.
  3. The panel shows time in every status, how often the issue came back to each one, and lead and cycle time — recomputed from the changelog, so it is right for issues that existed before you installed it.
  4. The numbers are mirrored into your fields, so "Days in current status" >= 5 works in JQL, filters, boards, dashboards and automation.

Working hours are a calendar you set: days, hours and holidays, in your timezone.

A caveat worth knowing

Jira’s embedded changelog is capped at roughly 100 entries. A long-running issue silently loses its early transitions, which corrupts every duration computed from it. Statusdesk pages the full changelog and flags an issue when it cannot finish, rather than showing a confident wrong number.

Statusdesk for Jira · DataForte AB · hello@dataforteab.com