How can JQL be constructed to show issues with no worklogs?

[Micheal Wall]

I'm looking for a bit of help. I'd like to apply a filter to look for issues that have no worklogs associated with them. I can see that there is a worklogDate field; however, according to Rovo, doing worklogDate is Empty is not guaranteed to work. The behavior of that is dependent on Jira version and is not considered stable. Indeed in my testing, that filter does not identify tasks that have no worklogs associated.

Does anyone have an example to quickly identify issues that do not yet have a single worklog associated with them?

[John Funk]

Hi Michael,

You might try: timespent is empty

If you are using Jira Cloud, which you say you are, then Version should not be a factor. 

[Bartek Szajkowski]

Hello Michael,

I'm Bartek from Orbiscend OU - technical and sales support for ARGON app.

In this case, suitable solution could be use the ARGON app and its worklog() function, instead of  worklogDate field, whose behavior – as correctly pointed out – depends on the Jira version.

To find issues that do not have any worklogs, you should first identify all issues with worklogs and then exclude them using the not in operator.

project = XYZ
AND issue not in worklog("project = XYZ")

Why this works

• issue in worklog("project = XYZ") returns all issues that have at least one worklog
• issue not in worklog(...) filters them out, leaving only issues with no worklogs at all

Best practices

• Always narrow down the subquery (for example, by project, issue type, or date range) to improve performance
• This approach works seamlessly with other JQL filters

Hope above tips will help you. ARGON you can find in Atlassian Marketplace.

All the best and good luck
Greetings