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.

15 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)

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.

Like • Rune Rasmussen likes this

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?)

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

Like • Yatish Madhav likes this

@Leandro Freire @Davide Giglioli

Linking and validating fields is something we we're able to accomodate for this release. I've added it as something to consider for future releases

@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