How to track effort for Epic / Story month wise

[Avijit Nath]

Hi All,

We are looking for options to check how much effort in one epic or story has been spent for a month. We do know that there's a field called time tracking in additional fields section, but we don't know how to put that tracking month wise.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hi @Avijit Nath ,

Are you only using native time tracking or some Marketplace app? The native solution is relatively limited but you could maybe write JQL such as 

worklogDate >= "2023-10-01" AND worklogDate <= "2023-10-31"

But this would still return work items instead of actual work logs.

What would probably work is if you'd pull worklogs data and information through REST API.
This will return worklogs, authors, dates, etc., and you'd be able to manipulate that further.

If looking at Marketplace apps, I do know that Tempo Timesheets provides an option to look at specific timeframes and offers a lot of filters specifically around worklogs. So, you could definitelly use that to 'group worklogs' and look at the time spent by Epics, Stories, or other types on daily, weekly, monthly... periods. 📊

Cheers,
Tobi

[Nacho Moreno Ortega]

Hi @Avijit Nath ,

I am Nacho and i am part of Decadis.

With our app Advanced Formula Fields - Calculated Custom Fields for Jira, you can display the value of a calculated field with live calculation results.

Here is an example of a calculation that can be used to determine the time spent of an Epic and its children. This can be adapted to a timeframe depending on your needs.

If using this app is an option for you, please do not hesitate to create a request in our support portal and we will gladly assist you.

Best regards,

Nacho

[Fatma Uzundemir from The Starware]

Hi @Avijit Nath ,

The standard Jira time tracking field maintains a single aggregated total for each issue, making it difficult to analyze how much time was spent during specific months across epics and their child stories. If you're open to 3rd-party apps, I'd recommend taking a look at WorklogPRO. With WorklogPRO,

⏱️ Flexible Time Period Reporting
You can generate reports for any time period you need — not just monthly. It supports 

• Daily, weekly, and monthly periods
• Current or previous period presets
• Sprint dates
• Any custom date range

This means you can instantly see how much work was logged on a specific epic or story within a given month, and filter or group results by user or issue.

📊 Epic-Level Visibility with Custom Fields
WLPC lets you group reports by user + issue hierarchy, making it easy to see time rolled up at the epic level. It also adds its own columns — Total Time Spent, Total Remaining Estimate, and Total Original Estimate — for deeper analysis.
 

💰 Labor Cost Tracking
If cost visibility matters, WLPC supports billable/non-billable tracking, user and project-based cost reports, and timesheet monitoring. Reports are exportable to Excel/CSV, and access is permission-based so managers can view what they need without exposing unnecessary data.

📤 Additional Highlights

• Exportable reports (Excel / CSV)
• Visual dashboards and charts for workload analysis
• Advanced working-hour and holiday scheme management
• Timesheet views in a user-focused, row-based format
•  Permission-based access for team leads and managers

🍀 To learn more, feel free to contact me or explore the application through the Atlassian Marketplace link I’ve provided. 🍀

Disclaimer:I work for the vendor who developed this application.

[Anastasia Andriyanova _Teamlead_]

Hi @Avijit Nath,

You’ve hit on a very well-known limitation. Standard Jira only tracks one running total for "Time Spent" per issue, meaning it out-of-the-box doesn't show you a month-by-month breakdown of when those hours were actually logged.

If you are looking for a straightforward way to see this without overcomplicating your setup with massive, heavy timesheet suites, you can easily track this with TeamTime: Resource Reports & Estimate vs Worklog Sumup.

Here is how it covers your exact case:

1. Month-Wise Breakdown: The app has a built-in Time period Quick filter. If you set it to a specific month (e.g., May 1st to May 31st), the report dynamically updates to show only the hours logged within those specific 31 days. This is perfect for tracking monthly effort or billing.

2. Epic & Story Hierarchy: By default, the data grid organizes everything by work items, meaning your child stories and sub-tasks are neatly grouped and rolled up under their top-tier parent Epic. You can instantly see the total effort at the Epic level for that specific month.

3. No Messy Exports: You can view these rolled-up metrics directly inside the interactive data grid, save the report configuration to share with your manager, or quickly export it to Excel/CSV if you need a snapshot for stakeholders.

The app is 100% free for teams of up to 10 users, so it’s super easy to install and test with your team to see if it gives you the exact monthly visibility you need.

Hope this helps!

(Full disclosure: I am a member of the Teamlead development team, the creators of TeamTime).

[Birkan Yildiz _OBSS_]

Hey @Avijit Nath

When tracking "effort," it is important to first distinguish between manually entered worklogs (timesheets) and the actual elapsed time an issue actively spends in progress. If you are looking to track the actual elapsed duration automatically rather than relying on manual time entry, native Jira does not easily break this down month-by-month.

If you are open to using a Marketplace app, you can easily track this exact monthly breakdown using Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira.

Here is how you can set it up to track your Epic and Story effort month-wise:

Monthly Breakdown: You can use the Status Duration per Time-Period report. By configuring the time-period to "Month", this report automatically splits the total time your issues spend in active workflow statuses into separate monthly columns. 

Roll-up to the Epic Level: To see the total aggregated effort for an Epic, change the report option to a Sum report.

Then, use the Group By option and select the Parent / Self Key field. This will automatically calculate the total durations of all child tasks and roll them up into a single row for the parent Epic.

True Business Time: You can also apply Timepiece's Custom Calendars to your report to automatically exclude weekends, nights, and public holidays. This ensures that the effort you track only reflects your team's actual business hours rather than raw 24/7 calendar time.

You can find Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace. Full disclosure, I'm on the team that makes Timepiece. Hope this helps you get the exact monthly visibility you need.

[Paul Glantschnig _Appfire_]

Hello @Avijit Nath,

As others have noted, Jira is limited here natively: a JQL filter like worklogDate >= "2026-05-01" AND worklogDate <= "2026-05-31" returns the issues that had time logged in that window, but not a clean per-issue total, and the built-in Σ Time Spent field only rolls up one level.

If you're open to an app from the Atlassian Marketplace, JXL can give you the monthly breakdown without exporting to a spreadsheet:

• Build a sheet from a JQL filter scoped to the month (the worklogDate range above)
• Show Time Spent and use sum-ups to roll the logged time up the Epic to Story to Sub-task hierarchy.
  For full control, a formula column can walk the whole descendant tree and total it E.g.:

function total(item: WorkItem) {
  let t = item.timeSpent ?? 0;
  for (const c of item.hierarchy.children) t += total(c);
  return t;
}
return total(this) / 3600; // total time spent in hours

(field identifiers like timeSpent come from the in-editor autocomplete)

Disclosure: I work on the team behind JXL.

Cheers, Paul

[Anton from JetHeads_io]

Hey @Avijit Nath! 👋

Native Jira time tracking only keeps one running total per issue — there's no built-in way to slice that logged time by month, or to see a month-by-month view across an epic and its stories.

That's the gap JetTime (a third-party Jira app) fills — you build a report, group it by Parent, and break the logged time down by month, so you can see how much effort each epic or story took in a given period.

• Timesheet view with a monthly breakdown (also day / week / quarter)
• Group by Parent to roll story time up under its epic
• Filter by date range, project, user, or a saved Jira filter
• Export to PDF, Excel, or CSV
• Runs on Atlassian — your data stays inside Atlassian Cloud, we don't have access

One thing to be clear about for today: grouping rolls time up by an issue's direct parent — so stories roll up to their epic, but work logged further down (e.g. on subtasks) rolls up to its own immediate parent, not all the way to the epic. The good news: we're shipping full roll-up of all child levels this week, which removes that single-level limit — so a month-wise total for an epic will include every nested issue underneath it.

👉 JetTime on the Atlassian Marketplace

— Anton, JetTime founder

[Alina Chyzh_Grandia Solutions]

Hi! Jira doesn't have a native way to view time logged against an Epic or Story broken down by month.

What you can do natively: Jira does record individual worklogs when team members click "Log time" on an issue. You can query those with JQL:

project = "YOUR_PROJECT" AND issueType in (Epic, Story) AND worklogDate >= "2026-05-01" AND worklogDate <= "2026-05-31"

This gives you a list of issues where time was logged in May but you still won't get a clean per-issue monthly summary inside Jira without exporting to a spreadsheet.

If you need a structured view hours per Epic/Story per month, week by week, a reporting app is the practical solution. We built Report Hub specifically for this: the Timesheet report lets you scope by issue type and period, and shows logged hours per issue broken down by week. The Rollup report handles aggregation up the issue hierarchy if you need Epic-level totals from child worklogs.

Report Hub Custom Charts, Reports & Timesheets for Jira on the Marketplace: https://bit.ly/4uZbd6n

[Deniz Oğuz - The Starware]

Hi Ali,

Jira has built-in "Σ Time Spent" custom field. It is pre-created but you need to add it to issue view yourself. It may only traverse one level though. If you want to sum-up deeper issue hierarchies your only option is to use a marketplace app. Some apps solve it by providing custom user interfaces and some of them just works as a custom field. Both have their advantages and dis-advantages. We also have a custom field app for this purpose, "Sum-up Custom Field". You can try it for free, it has capability to calculate sum-up of any numeric field, including the "time spent" field recursively for all issue hierarchy levels. 

Disclaimer: I'm an employee of the company developing "Sum-up Custom Field".