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What is the correct way to add or track planned holidays/personal time off in Jira? I would like to

Garama

I want to enter my planned holidays for 2026 in Jira so that my manager can easily see my availability. However, I cannot find any native feature in Jira for personal holiday or PTO tracking. Does Jira support this natively, or do I need a plugin such as ActivityTimeline or Vacation Manager (since Jira does not include built‑in holiday tracking)?

If plugins are required, which one is most suitable for simple personal holiday visibility?

Comments

Nikola Perisic

Hello @Garama

You can create a new Kanban board that will be shared with your manager. From there, you can have Start and End date added to your screen. A new field of number value would have to be created that will calculate the difference between the dates with an automation rule:

Screenshot 2026-01-28 at 10.58.39.png

For the last component of the automation rule, your field will be named differently.

Mendel Liang

Hi Garama -

As of yet there isn't an official native Jira feature that tracks a user's time off - however there is a feature in development which is meant to tackle this case natively called Individual Capacity Planning here if you'd like some more information about it. https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Introducing-Individual-Capacity-Planning-in-Jira-Join-our-Early/ba-p/3161425

Thomas Chung_bgmiwu

Jira doesn't have this yet. The Individual Capacity Planning feature is still in progress.

The cleanest workaround I've seen is a dedicated project with a simple workflow (Requested > Approved > Done) and custom fields for dates and leave type. It's manual but it works. The Kanban approach someone suggested is similar but your PTO shows up on your boards, which can get noisy.

There are also Marketplace apps that handle this without creating issues. I built one (TeamOps), Tempo has it as part of their suite, and there are a few others. Depends on what matters to you most.

Vahtang Manukyan - Be On Time

@Garama , you have touched on one of the most common frustrations in Jira.

The reason you can't find a native feature is that Jira treats everything as an 'issue.' When you track PTO as a ticket or a separate project, you are managing the administration of the holiday, but you aren't managing the impact on the project.

In a professional governance model, PTO is not a 'ticket' - it is a capacity constraint.

The trap most teams fall into is the 'Manual Adjustment' cycle: someone takes a week off, and the PM manually pushes five tickets forward on the roadmap. This is a reactive approach that leads to the 'Planning Lie' - where your roadmap says one thing, but your actual human availability says another.

If you want your manager to see your availability, the goal shouldn't be 'visibility of the holiday,' but 'visibility of the remaining capacity.'

When you shift from tracking PTO to managing capacity, the holidays automatically reflect as reduced availability in the plan, and the roadmap adjusts deterministically. No manual ticket-pushing required.

While Jira is a best-in-class issue tracker, it is not a resource management tool. To bridge this functional gap, we developed Resource Management for Jira. It manages calendars and PTO approval workflows while ensuring project planning is always based on real-world constraints.

You can find the solution here on the Marketplace

(Full disclosure: I'm affiliated with the team that developed this app).

Rahul_RVS

Hi @Garama

Welcome to the community !!

For Jira cloud, If you would like to try a mktplace app for tracking resource workload and holiday planning across multiple projects/boards, take a look at

Capacity Planner

The app offers:

1. Resource Tracking and Allocation : The app allows you to monitor and track various resources by adding them as part of a template, and their work allocation across multiple projects / sprints.

2. Real-time Visualization: Provides intuitive charts, graphs to visualize resource utilization and capacity levels in real-time.

3. Full Sprint / Project Fix version Capacity and Monitoring

Mode details here

Disclaimer : I am one of the app team member

Capacity Planner.jpg

Monitor Work.jpg

Anastasia Andriyanova _Teamlead_

Hi @Garama,

Welcome to the community!

You are completely right — if your main goal is simply to make your personal holidays visible to your manager, you probably don't need heavy, complex resource management plugins that shift your entire team's workflow and require a steep learning curve.

Technically, you can try native workarounds, like using basic built-in calendar views in Jira. However, the native features come with a catch: Jira doesn't really allow you to mix and match different issue types or personal events flexibly on a single calendar view. It’s easy to miss something or end up with a very cluttered screen.

To fix exactly this issue and provide clean transparency through flexibility, our team developed Calendar for Jira.

It acts as that perfect middle ground: it lets you track your PTO and project events smoothly right next to each other, so your manager can see your exact availability at a single glance without getting lost in noisy boards.

It is completely free for up to 10 users, so you can easily test it out with your manager. If you ever want a quick walkthrough or need help setting it up, feel free to book a live demo with us!

(Full disclosure: I am a member of the Teamlead development team, and we are the creators of Calendar for Jira).