Forums

Articles
Create
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Can someone help me with the not in JQL ?

Wakil BENAMOUR October 16, 2025

Hi,

I need help with a JQL query, please. I'm having trouble with “not in.” I feel like there's been a change, or maybe I've been using it wrong all along?

For example, I have this JQL:
project = Name_project and issuetype = Anomalies and labels not in (ano_US) and statusCategory NOT IN (Done)

What I'm trying to do is isolate only the anomalies that are tagged with the label “ano_US” and keep the rest. I feel like at one point, just putting “not in” was enough to exclude them.

Have I missed something? If so, please let me know.

Thanks in advance for your help.

5 answers

2 votes
Bert Dombrecht
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
October 16, 2025

Hello @Wakil BENAMOUR ,

Your query will also exclude work items without a label.
To keep those in, you need to add:

... AND (labels NOT IN ("ano_US") OR labels IS EMPTY) ...

Would that solve your problem?

0 votes
Lukas Maczejka - JXL
Contributor
October 17, 2025

Hi @Wakil BENAMOUR,

as mentioned by others - you're likely missing the IS EMPTY part of your JQL filter. 

If you want a more powerful filtering experience, and if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your Jira data that allows viewing, inline-editing, copy-pasting, sorting, and filtering by all your work items' fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel, Google Sheets, Smartsheet, or Airtable.

It also comes with a long list of further features, like support for complex label filtering (including regular expression matching). This is how it looks like in action:

labels-specific-labels-via-regex.gif

This is really just one of a virtually infinite number of sheets you can build - it all depends on what data you want to see and drill into.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,
Lukas

0 votes
Gor Greyan
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
October 16, 2025

Hi @Wakil BENAMOUR

If you write labels not in (ano_US), it returns all tickets that have la abel and it is not ano_US.
For the correct one, you should use

labels not in(ano_US) or labels is empty, for including also tickets without labels.

0 votes
Varsha Joshi
Community Champion
October 16, 2025

Hi @Wakil BENAMOUR 

If your goal was to get a list of anamolies for your project which do not have label ano_US, that is being met by your JQL before the AND. The second part is needed only if you have to get unresolved items.

I hope my answer makes sense. Let me know if I misunderstood it.

Have a great day!

0 votes
Kai Krause
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
October 16, 2025

HI,

The not in operator works correctly in Jira JQL—it hasn't changed.

I think it could be a missunderstanding:

  • labels in (ano_US) → Returns issues WITH the label "ano_US"
  • labels not in (ano_US) → Returns issues WITHOUT the label "ano_US"

    But you can also write AND (labels is empty or labels != ano_US)

    I hope i get you right 

    BR
    Kai

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer
DEPLOYMENT TYPE
CLOUD
PRODUCT PLAN
PREMIUM
PERMISSIONS LEVEL
Product Admin
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events