How to calculate total time spent on Jira tickets automatically?

[mr john]

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to figure out how to calculate the total time each Jira issue spends in different statuses, like Open, In Progress, and Pending. Right now, I check the history manually and sum it up, which takes a lot of time.

I want something like a calculator that can automatically add up all the time spent per issue and give a total. Ideally, it should consider:

Time in each status

Time when the issue is on hold

Excluding weekends and holidays if possible

Is there a built-in way, an automation rule, or a marketplace app that can do this? Any tips or examples would be really helpful.

Thanks!

[Rustem Shiriiazdanov _Actonic_]

Hey @mr john ! 

Unfortunately Jira doesn't really have a built-in way to do this properly. You can see the transitions in the History tab, but there's no "total time in status" summary anywhere native.
What most people end up doing is grabbing a marketplace app. A few options exist for instance, Time in Status by Oberon- pretty popular, shows time per status right on the issue view. My team has also developed our own solution - Report Builder, with a time in status tempaltes.

If you don't want to pay for an app, the other option is pulling data through the REST API. You can hit /rest/api/3/issue/{key}?expand=changelog and get all the status transitions with timestamps, then calculate the durations yourself. I've done this with a quick Python script before and it works, but it's more effort to set up and maintain. Something like Python's numpy.busday_count handles the weekend exclusion part.

There's also the automation route, you could create rules that log timestamps into custom fields whenever an issue moves to a new status. But honestly this only works going forward (no historical data) and gets messy fast if you have a lot of statuses.So I would either do my own scripting to calculate that, or use any applciation from the marketplace.

Hope it helps :)