Coming soon: Use direct assignment for organization admin access

Sabina Sequeira

Hi organization admins,

We’re changing how organization admin access is granted in Atlassian organizations.

Who is affected?

This change applies if your organization currently uses org-admins group membership to grant or revoke organization admin roles.

What is changing?

Today: Users become organization admins when they are added to the org-admins group (and lose access when removed).

Soon: Organization admin access will be managed only by direct role assignment to individual users.

The org-admins group will remain as a default group, but it will no longer grant or revoke the organization admin role. This means if you use the user-management API to add or remove users to the org-admins group, your API response will return as successful but this will not add or remove org admin role permissions for the users added.

What happens to existing org admins?

Atlassian will automatically migrate current organization admins to direct role assignments. You don’t need to re-add existing admins to preserve access.

What you need to do

If you use APIs, scripts or infrastructure as code to add or remove people from org-admins as an Organization Admin workflow, update both actions before the change:

• Use the assign organization-level role API to grant access.
• Use the remove organization-level role API to revoke access.

If you do not use APIs, use the direct invite and role-removal flows in Atlassian Administration. Do not use org-admins membership to manage organization admin. If you already use direct role assignment, no action is required.

After the change: Confirm that the direct organization admin list matches your intended administrators.

What happens if you do nothing?

If you rely on org-admins to manage organization admin, adding or removing group members will no longer grant or revoke the role. Customers already using direct role assignment are unaffected.

Timing

The rollout will be complete by January 2027. Affected organization admins will receive an email after the change is complete.

Get help

Contact Atlassian Support if you have questions. Enterprise customers can also contact their Atlassian account representative.

Mia Tamm _Simpleasyty_

Hi @Sabina Sequeira this makes sense, especially for such a privileged role. Having Organization Admin access explicitly assigned rather than implicitly inherited from group membership feels much clearer.

One thing I’d be interested in is how this will work for larger organizations from an auditing/reconciliation perspective. Will there be an easy way through the API (and audit logs) to retrieve the full list of direct Organization Admin assignments and track when they were added or removed?

I can imagine that becoming important once the org-admins group is no longer the source of truth.