Intermittent Error: "Field 'priority' cannot be set" When Creating Issue via REST API

[Chris Kowalski]

 We are experiencing an intermittent issue when creating issues via the Jira REST API. While most of the time the issue creation works correctly, sometimes we receive the following error response:

 {
  "errorMessages": [],
  "errors": {
    "priority": "Field 'priority' cannot be set. It is not on the appropriate screen, or unknown."
  }
}

This happens randomly and inconsistently. For example, we can create 10 issues in a row successfully with identical payloads, and then suddenly one request fails with this error.

Here is a sample of the JSON payload we are sending to the POST /rest/api/3/issue endpoint:

 {
  "fields": {
    "project": {
      "key": "XYZ"
    },
    "issuetype": {
      "id": "10139"
    },
    "summary": {
      "type": "doc",
      "version": 1,
      "content": [
        {
          "type": "paragraph",
          "content": [
            {
              "type": "text",
              "text": "text"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    "reporter": {
      "accountId": "712020:71d9b094-740b-4965-a106-668657202774"
    },
    "assignee": {
      "accountId": "5da07d6487dd6f0dcb4d86c3"
    },
    "priority": {
      "name": "Medium"
    }
  }
}

We have verified that:

• The field priority exists and is valid.

• The field works for the same project (XYZ) and issue type (id: 10139).

• We are using Jira Cloud.

• No changes were made to screen configurations at the time of the error.

It seems like a caching or field visibility issue on Jira’s side, especially because the same payload works one moment and fails the next.

Could you please help investigate:

1. Why this error appears inconsistently?

2. Is there any caching or delay in field visibility we should account for?

3. Is there a workaround or best practice we can use to avoid this error?

[David Freitez · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chris Kowalski 

Welcome to the community, I have been doing some research regarding your described problem and it seems that Jira API error might be misleading since there is an error thrown indicating a field but the actual problem is with another field.

Here is the raised request that didn´t got solved:  Misleading error while creating issue using REST API

So the problem being intermittent is that there could be 1 required field that is not being set on all of the issues.

To troubleshoot, try to catch one of the failing API requests and use that information to create the issue via the UI and try to see if there is an error with any of the fields, also, use the same user you are using to execute your API requests.

Regards,
David 

[Chris Kowalski]

Hi @David Freitez , thanks for your response.

Following your suggestion, I retried creating the issue using the exact same data that previously failed — and this time it went through successfully without any errors.

This further confirms the intermittent nature of the issue. Since no fields or values were changed, and the same API payload now works, it seems unlikely that the error is caused by a missing required field.

Could this still be related to a temporary inconsistency in screen configurations or field visibility on the Jira Cloud backend?

Any recommendations to make our integration more robust against this kind of transient behavior would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards, Chris