5 essential Jira time reports to optimize your work in 2025
Understanding how time is spent in your organization is key to improving productivity, managing budgets, and making informed decisions. In Jira, users can log time directly on work items, which opens the door to analyzing this data through Jira time reports – either using built-in options or third-party tools that offer more advanced insights.
At SolDevelo, we use our own app, Worklogs – Time Tracking and Time Reports, to go beyond the basics. Different teams and roles often need to view time data in different ways –some may want to track how many hours each team member logged, while others focus on how much time was spent on a particular project or how much of the budget has been used. But those views only scratch the surface.
Sometimes, a more refined approach is needed to truly understand how time is being spent. That’s why we rely on custom reports in Worklogs to gain deeper, more meaningful insights. In this article, we’re sharing the top 5 time tracking reports we use to keep our projects on track –and that you might find helpful in your own workflow, too.
5 Jira time reports you should try
1. Time tracking by user in a project
One of our go-to reports is time logged by user, grouped by project. This view helps us understand how team members are distributing their efforts across multiple initiatives - a valuable perspective, especially when people split their time between several projects.
This report is great for spotting patterns:
For example, if someone is burning too much time in that 'easy' project, but avoids the more challenging one, this will be visible in this report. Or maybe someone is avoiding that legacy project like the plague? Such insights are easily surfaced in this report and can help managers ensure alignment with priorities and commitments.
You can also flip this view - categorize by project and group by user. This version highlights how much each team member contributes to a given project. You can see who is the workhorse behind a given project and who just contributes a few hours here and there.
Both perspectives are useful for understanding effort distribution and balancing workloads more effectively.
2. Time tracking by work item type
Another valuable report we frequently rely on shows time spent by work item type. This breakdown helps us understand how our team's efforts are being allocated across different types of work.
It’s especially useful for identifying red flags. For example, if a large portion of time is consistently spent fixing bugs, it could indicate deeper quality issues within the project. On the other hand, a healthy balance between bug fixes and feature development often signals smoother progress and better product stability.
3. Time tracking by fix version
Categorizing time entries by fix version and grouping by user is a powerful way to analyze how much effort went into a specific release, and who contributed the most. This view helps you assess the scope of work for each version and identify which team members were most involved in getting it over the finish line.
To gain even more insight, you can enhance this report by adding a secondary grouping by work item type. This layered view lets you break down contributions further - revealing who focused on bug fixes, who developed new features, and how those efforts shaped the final release.
4. Time tracking by users in work items
Sometimes a low-level view of things is required - it's often enlightening to see how much time each user spent in every one of their work items.
5. Time tracking by Epics and other hierarchy levels
In Jira, Epics represent large bodies of work broken down into smaller tasks - but they’re just one part of a broader hierarchy. Depending on your setup, you may also use Initiatives, Legends, or other custom levels to structure your work. Time tracking across hierarchy levels provides valuable visibility into how effort is distributed from high-level goals down to individual tasks.
A common and effective way to visualize this is with a Project → Epic → Work item breakdown. This multi-level report shows how much time is being spent at each stage. It helps teams understand the bigger picture while still drilling into the details.
A variation of this report does not go into the work item-level, but rather shows how much time users spend by epics. This can be achieved by changing the secondary grouping option to User.
Summary
These are just a few Jira time reports that we use in order to get a better overview of the time being spent in our organization. All of these can be created with our app, Worklogs - Time Tracking and Time Reports. The categorization/grouping model gives the flexibility to group the data in a way that is meaningful to the user viewing the report. The settings can be quickly changed and you are free to experiment with the groupings to your heart's desire.
We hope you create reports that show information that is really meaningful to you and helps you achieve your goals more efficiently. What are your favorite categorizations/groupings? Which configurations do you use most often?
Feel free to share them with us in the comments section!
You can also always consult our documentation in case of any issues.
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Urszula Kaczorek
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Employer Branding Specialist
SolDevelo
Gdynia
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