Jira Cloud work item field size and voter/watcher count limits

[#1]

Summary

Audience: App developers, integrators, and teams operating automated systems or planning large migrations. Customers using Jira interactively for day-to-day work are highly unlikely to be affected.

Jira Cloud is enforcing limits on work item field sizes and on the number of voters and watchers per work item. These limits supplement the existing per-work-item limits described in https://support.atlassian.com/jira/kb/work-item-field-limits-in-jira-cloud/, which remain unchanged. The limits help safeguard platform storage and reliability, but are set high enough that most customers will not encounter them during day-to-day activity.

Limits enforced from August 2026

These limits are most relevant to app developers, integrators, automation owners, and teams planning large migrations. Most customers using Jira day to day are unlikely to be affected.

Starting in August 2026, Jira Cloud will enforce hard limits on work item field sizes and voter/watcher counts per work item to ensure continued reliability and safeguard platform storage.

What's limited	Limit (enforced — cannot be exceeded)
Voters per work item	50,000
Watchers per work item	50,000
Any single previously-unbounded work item field	25 MB

For context: how large is 25 MB? Roughly 25 million plain-text characters — about 4 million words or several thousand pages. A typical field is only a few KB long.

Which fields does the 25 MB limit apply to

Fields that previously had no size cap, including:

• Remote issue link text values (summary, URL, icon URL, icon title, status description, status icon URL)

• Plain text and URL custom fields (not rich text)

• Other unbounded string values (for example, sprint name, state, goal; SLA-related fields, Approvals-related fields)

Fields that already have a limit are not affected — most notably the 1 MB cap on individual rich-text entries (description, comments, worklogs, and rich-text custom fields).

When these limits may be encountered

1. Everyday interactive use

Creating work items, writing comments, logging work, or adding watchers by hand would not normally approach these limits unless the existing data is already near the limits.

For normal interactive use, they are effectively invisible.

2. Apps, integrations, and automation

Applications and automated processes, a Marketplace app, a script against the REST API, or automation that appends content in bulk, can approach a limit that a person never would. Design for these ceilings: handle a rejection rather than assuming every write succeeds, and avoid accumulating unbounded content on a single work item.

3. Migrations

Migration is the most likely way to exceed a limit, as a single import can carry a work item’s entire multi-year history into Jira at once. Jira will automatically handle oversized content during migration via transformation. Contact Atlassian Support if you are blocked during a migration.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this @Snehal Shah