I’ve recently had several customers ask about time tracking for individual users in Jira. Jira’s current time-tracking capabilities focus on the work items, with estimates of how long it will take to complete a given work item and how much time has already been spent vs. what’s remaining. Jira doesn’t really provide metrics based on the Jira users themselves.
There are many Atlassian Marketplace apps for time tracking, but not all customers can afford to pay for that functionality. So, I did some testing to see what time-tracking data you can get from Jira without installing any Marketplace apps. Here’s what I found, along with how I set it up so you can try the same thing on your own site.
Viewing Total Time Spent per User:
Step 1. Using JQL + Time Spent to report on logged work
You can report on logged time using the Time Spent field and a saved filter.
In my example, I wanted to see all worklog entries for a single month. The JQL I used looked like this:
project = "Mobile Dev"AND worklogDate >= 2026-01-01AND worklogDate < 2026-02-01
You can tweak this for:
- Different projects
- Different date ranges
- Sprints or other filters you care about
Once you have your filter, make sure the Time Spent column is included in the filter’s issue navigator view so you can see the logged time per issue.
Step 2. Viewing the results on a Jira dashboard
If desired, you can display the results of the above filter on a Jira dashboard using the Filter results gadget.
- Go to your Jira dashboard (or create a new one).
- Add the Filter results gadget:
- Choose your saved filter (the one using worklogDate).
- Configure columns and sort order as needed.
- Save the gadget.
I configured mine to show the key fields plus Time Spent, and it ended up looking like this:
Clicking Save gave me this on my Jira dashboard:
Pro tip: The Filter Results gadget is incredibly flexible – any query you can write in JQL (or have Rovo help you write!) can be displayed on a Jira dashboard using this gadget. Once you get comfortable with saved filters, this becomes a go-to reporting tool.
Jira User Workload report - for time remaining on assigned tasks
Related to time tracking, Jira also offers the User workload report, which shows work assigned to users across projects:
While reviewing this report, I was curious: does it show time spent or time remaining?
To check, I took my simple example and did the math manually. This is the time I logged for my three work items:
Logged time (DONE) = 2 days
- 3 hours + 1 day (8 hours) + 5 hours = 16 hours or 2 days total
Remaining time (TO DO) = 4 days, 3 hours remaining
- 2 days (16 hours) + 2 days (16 hours) + 3 hours = 35 hours or 4 days, 3 hours remaining
The above User workload report, above, shows 4 days and 3 hours for that user, so we have our answer: it shows the time remaining for all work assigned to that user.
This means you can use both options to get the full picture:
- Time Spent per user(via filters + dashboards) to understand what’s been done
- User workload report to understand what’s left to do
Wrap-up
Without adding any Marketplace apps, you can still get useful time tracking views out of Jira by combining:
- JQL using worklogDate
- The Time Spent field
- Optional: The Filter results dashboard gadget
- The User workload report for the remaining effort
Whew, that was a lot of screenshots and math, but I hope it’s helpful for anyone trying to get more value from Jira’s built-in time tracking!
If you have other favorite time tracking setups or reports (with or without apps), I’d love to hear how you’re doing it, so please share in the comments below! 😀
