Approvals now available in all CMP project types for Premium customers

October 8, 2025

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Approvals for Company Managed Projects (CMP) in Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise editions! Approvals brings a new level of control and formal sign off to your CMP workflows making it easier than ever to manage critical steps in your projects.

Why should I use approvals?

In many workflows, certain steps require formal signoff before work can proceed. Whether it’s a manager approving a new feature request, a finance team member signing off on a purchase, a legal review on a new contract, or a QA lead verifying a bug fix - getting the official “go-ahead” is crucial for teams to deliver high quality outcomes.

Previously, teams had to rely on workarounds to manage this. You might have used:

Status changes: Moving an issue from "In Review" to "Approved."
Comments and @mentions: Asking stakeholders to leave a comment to signify their approval.
Custom fields: Using a dropdown or checkbox to mark an issue as approved.

While these methods work, they lack the structure, clarity, and audit trail of a formal approval process. It can be difficult to see who approved a request and when, and it’s easy for sign-offs to get lost in a long comment thread.

How it works

With the new Approvals feature, you can now add a dedicated approval step directly into your Company-Managed Project workflows. This allows you to formally request and capture sign-off from one or more users before an issue can transition to its next status. Furthermore, every approval decision creates an audit log, showing exactly who approved the work and when. This log is fully searchable via JQL, just like any other field, giving you powerful reporting and oversight capabilities.

Watch this quick demo to see how you can set up approvals and use them in your projects.

Ready to get started?

CMP approvals is available on Jira premium & enterprise licences
If you are a Jira Administrator, head to your workflow editor to add an approval step to your Company-Managed Projects today. We can’t wait to see how you use this to streamline your team's processes!

We value your input and want to ensure you have the best experience with Jira. If you encounter any issues, have suggestions, or need assistance, please reach out here or via our support channels.

25 comments

It's great to see this. Why can't Roles be used to define approvers?

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Yes i think Roles make a lot more sense instead of some user picker fields

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can you add validator to the approval transition? (e.g. you cannot approve if one field is empty)

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When will this be available?
I do not have the Approvals menu shown in the video in my workflow editor (having Jira Premium license).

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It is unfortunate that another basic feature is hidden behind the Premium and higher versions of the app.

JSM has approvals regardless of whether you are using the standard or premium version.

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Thanks @Ben Payne - super happy about this!

Agree with the comments. It would be nice to allow certain roles or groups to edit the field used for the Approvers (user or group pickers)

I do also think this should be made available from Standard and up (even though we are on Premium too)

Also, on log is fully searchable via JQL, what are the all the methods or clause options we can use for this?

Thanks, Yatish

Like • Ben Payne likes this

We don't have the feature yet available either?When will it be deployed and available for Enterprise license customer?

Like • Dan W likes this

There is a nice and very important feature request in relation to this topic: [JSDCLOUD-6988] Approval steps should not bypass workflow validator - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

As long as approvals bypass the validators, this is just another 80% solution that is not helpful. But hey, the feature request is only open for 7 years, there might be some movement in the near future?

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Very good to finally, at long last, have approvals for JSW.

In the past we've had to be very creative with workflow properties and transition conditions/validators.
It'll be good to get that scrapped and moved into an actual approval function.

Some initial feedback:

Before being allowed to even get the "configure approval" screen to pop up at least one outbound transition must exist, but when configuring the approval a transition must be selected for both Approved and Declined and these cannot be the same transition.
So in reality at least two outbound transitions must exist before approval can be configured.
It would be good if either two transitions had to exist before the screen could pop up, or if we could use the same transition for both approved and declined (even though that would be a bit of an odd situation), just to make the behaviour and restrictions described align with reality.

In your video there is a "Set default approvers".
I don't see that option on our site. Is that rolling out seperately?
And is that also available for JSM approval (or will it be?)

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I don't see email notifications mentioned in this blog post or any documentation. Since, in the JSM projects, the email content for approval request notifications is configured in the customer notifications, and those types of emails don't exist in non-JSM projects, how can the content of the email be customized?

Like • Rune Rasmussen likes this

I didn't see anything unusual. The current JSM screen displays the same information, you just changed the look.

What you need to do is make it possible to link fields to fill in rejection cases, including making this visible to the Applicant Portal.

Having a field to justify rejection is a basic feature of any ITSM tool and very important and necessary for ISO Certification Audits.

@Ganesh Choubey D @Yatish Madhav

@lc

For this release we weren't able to accomodate using roles to define approvers. I've added it as something to consider for future releases

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@Leandro Freire @Davide Giglioli

Linking and validating fields is something we weren't able to accomodate for this release. I've added it as something to consider for future releases

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@Dr. Anja Wolter

Ensure you're using the new workflow editor. If that doesn't work, please reach out to support and we'll make sure you can use approvals asap.

@Andreas Faul

Approvals is rolling out to release tracks now and can take a while before being deployed. If you'd like earlier access on your enterprise licence please reach out to support and we can enable it earlier

Thanks @Ben Payne - what JQL operators, methods, clauses are available for these approvals?

Thank you for gathering feedback about this, and then finally implementing this.

Combining this feature with automations to automatically add certain users to the approver field(s) when an issue is created, will solve at least 90% of the use cases where we need users to approve something from managers or team leads. Cheers.

Like • Ben Payne likes this

Regarding using a checklist as an approval solution - Checklists for Jira includes a searchable, sortable, downloadable audit history capturing interactions with the checklist. It's a good option that doesn't require configuration from the Jira admin, and is available in Free and Standard instances.

Before I complain... I'm happy that this is finally being implemented.

From an admin perspective however it's weird to have different approval experiences in JSM and Jira. They offer the same functionality but they're visually on different screens which isn't necessarily going to cause confusion but ideally there would be consistency around how common functionality works across products.

It's also confusing for new admins around what will and won't work in these workflow setups. In the old workflow editor it will allow you to add screens, conditions, post-functions to the transitions which will all be completely ignored. In the new editor it will still allow you to add conditions, which will also be completely ignored.

I still want to use screens / conditions / post functions but giving me the option to add them when they're never going to work is confusing and annoying. This is partially related to this:

Ability to display screens on Approve/Deny Service Desk Transitions

While testing I found it strange also that changes to workflow wouldn't impact on existing active approvals? So if v1.0 asked for approval groups and v1.1 asked for a single approver, I'd have to return to the approval step before being asked for a single approver... Is that by design?

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Thanks for rolling out this feature :)

Is it just me or does the approval trigger within the automation not trigger for non-jsm spaces? Maybe I did configure something wrong on my end though.

@Peter unfortunately we're using a different emailing system to JSM approvals. At this time the emails in this system aren't configurable. I've added it as a note for future releases

@Chris,

Thanks for bringing this up, speaking to JSM about this and how we can work it into future releases.

I’ve seen many teams represent complex business scenarios through large, rigid workflows — which often reduces flexibility and increases maintenance for administrators.

To address that, I developed the new major version 3.x of my app Group Sign-Off / Multi-Approval for Jira Cloud, which enables parallel approvals across configurable user sets — such as Jira groups, project roles, user picker fields, or even JSM asset attributes like owners or stakeholders. Each set of deciders can include conditions like enforcing four-eyes principles.

It provides full transparency into who approved, declined, or delegated decisions, maintaining a complete decision history. In addition to deciders, admins can delegate on behalf of others when needed for business continuity.

Decisions can include timeouts that trigger optional predefined outcomes, and auto-transitions can be configured to update an issue’s status once a final decision is reached.

The app works in both company-managed projects (with centralized field management) and team-managed projects under Activities → Multi-Approvals. It’s ideal for complex, conditional approvals requiring transparency and full participant history — all without modifying your Jira workflows.

You can find it on the Atlassian Marketplace.

— Developed by Frank Polscheit

Like • Rune Rasmussen likes this

Are there any plans on adding approvals to team managed projects for premium tier tenants?

I’m really glad to see Atlassian bringing native approvals into Jira - it shows how essential structured decision-making has become for teams of all sizes.

That said, many organizations need far more flexibility and control than built-in approvals currently offer, especially when managing complex, conditional, or multi-step processes across different project types.

That’s why we built Approval Path for Jira.
It allows you to design reusable approval definitions that can be triggered manually or automatically, combining a variety of step types, including users, groups, email (for external approvals), work item fields, votes, automations, and webhooks. Steps can run sequentially or in parallel, and each decision can require justifications, consent, or allow abstentions.

You can also define expiration rules, custom notification frequency, and even delegations when someone’s unavailable, ensuring no approval ever gets stuck. Conditional logic lets you launch specific steps (or entire definitions) based on criteria like budget or location, and admins can monitor all activity from a single unified dashboard.

Approval Path supports all Jira project types and plans with the same intuitive UI, integrates with JSM customers, and already includes workflow validation and a full REST API.
For teams using Confluence, there’s even a matching version of the app - the same interface, the same logic, just a different surface.

It’s ideal for complex, conditional approvals that require transparency, traceability, and control - all without modifying your Jira workflows.

You can explore Approval Path for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace.