How to Measure Approval Time in Jira

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Approval time is one of the easiest workflow metrics to overlook in Jira — and one of the most expensive to ignore.

A task can move quickly through execution, testing, or delivery, but still get stuck waiting for approval from a manager, reviewer, legal team, procurement, compliance, or another stakeholder. When that happens, teams usually feel the delay long before they can clearly explain it.

That is why approval time is worth measuring as a separate workflow metric.

With Time Metrics Tracker, you can measure how long Jira issues spend between workflow stages, including approval-related transitions. The app is designed for tracking time between statuses, custom workflow metrics, thresholds, work schedules, exports, and flow-focused Jira analytics, which makes it a strong fit for approval-time analysis.

What is approval time in Jira?

Approval time is the amount of time an issue spends waiting for a decision before it can move forward.

Depending on your workflow, this can mean:

• time from Submitted → Approved
• time from Pending Approval → In Progress
• time from Waiting for Review → Done
• time spent between any two statuses that represent an approval, review, or sign-off step

In many teams, this is not just an operational metric. It affects delivery speed, SLA performance, customer response timelines, and internal process efficiency.

If your team uses Jira Service Management, Jira Software, or custom business workflows in Jira, approval time is often one of the clearest indicators of where work really slows down.

Why approval delays are hard to see in Jira

Jira stores workflow history, but that does not automatically give you clear approval-time reporting.

You may see that an issue entered a certain status, but questions like these are still difficult to answer:

• How long do approvals usually take?
• Which approval step creates the biggest delay?
• Are approvals slower for certain request types or teams?
• Which issues breached our internal approval target?
• How much of that delay happened during business hours?

Without a dedicated metric layer, approval bottlenecks often stay buried inside issue history instead of becoming something teams can actually report on and improve.

Common approval workflow examples in Jira

Team / function	What to track	Why it matters
IT service management	Pending Approval → Approved Pending Change Approval → Scheduled Submitted → First Decision	Helps IT teams understand whether service requests, change requests, or access requests are delayed by internal sign-offs.
Procurement	Request Created → Approved Waiting for Manager Approval → Vendor Review Budget Approval → Purchase Initiated	Makes it easier to see where procurement queues slow down and which approval step is causing the delay.
HR and internal operations	Submitted → Approved Approval Pending → Onboarding Started Manager Review → Completed	Useful for onboarding, internal service requests, policy approvals, and equipment requests.
Software delivery	In Review → Approved Code Review → Merged Ready for Release → Approved for Release	Helps teams spot review delays, release bottlenecks, and approval-related slowdowns in delivery workflows.

How to measure approval time with Time Metrics Tracker

With Time Metrics Tracker, the idea is simple: define the approval path you want to measure, then analyze how long issues take to move through it.

1. Start from the project you want to analyze

Now it is even easier to open Time Metrics Tracker when you are investigating approval delays in a specific Jira project.

You can launch the app directly from the Jira Space Navigation, so there is no need to leave the project and switch to a separate screen first. That makes the workflow more convenient and keeps your analysis in the right context from the start — focused on the exact project and board you are already working with.

2. Identify the approval transition that matters

Start with the exact handoff you need to measure.

For example:

• Submitted → Approved
• Pending Approval → Done
• Review Requested → Approved
• Waiting for Sign-off → Completed

The more clearly you define the workflow pair, the more useful the metric becomes.

3. Create a metric for that approval step

In Time Metrics Tracker, you can create a metric that measures the duration between the two statuses that define your approval process.

This gives you a focused view of the approval step itself, rather than blending it into the total lifecycle of the issue. 

4. Use filters to narrow the report

Once the metric is set up, filter the results by the dimensions that matter most to your team.

For example:

• issue type
• status
• assignee
• label
• sprint
• date range

5. Add thresholds to detect slow approvals earlier

Not every approval delay matters equally.

That is why it helps to define warning and critical thresholds for the approval metric. Time Metrics Tracker supports warning and critical thresholds so teams can highlight slow-moving tickets before they turn into missed SLAs or wider delivery delays.

For example:

• warning after 8 business hours
• critical after 24 business hours

This shifts approval tracking from passive reporting to active bottleneck detection.

6. Use work schedules for more realistic reporting

Approval metrics are much more useful when they reflect actual working time.

If an issue enters Pending Approval on Friday evening and is approved Monday morning, raw calendar time and business time tell very different stories. Time Metrics Tracker supports work schedule settings so teams can exclude weekends and holidays and get reporting that matches real operating hours.

What approval-time reporting can reveal

Once you start tracking approval time consistently, patterns become easier to see.

For example:

• one approval step is slower than the rest of the workflow
• a particular request type spends too long in approval
• some teams approve quickly, while others create recurring delays
• average resolution time looks acceptable, but approvals are hiding the bottleneck
• most of the lost time is queue time, not active review time

That changes the conversation from “approvals feel slow” to “this exact workflow transition is slowing delivery.”

Final thoughts

Approval workflows are often where Jira processes slow down most — not because teams are doing the wrong work, but because decision steps are hard to isolate and measure.

With Time Metrics Tracker, teams can measure approval-related transitions, apply thresholds, use work schedules, export the results, and now open the app directly from Jira Space Navigation to work in the context of the project they are analyzing. 

Measure the handoff. Find the bottleneck. Improve the flow.

Try Time Metrics Tracker to measure approval time in Jira and turn approval bottlenecks into clear, actionable workflow insights.