Can you deactivate Users in Jira Data Center?

[Steven Janvrin]

Can you deactivate users in Jira data center? The only options available are Edit User Groups, View Project Roles, Anonymize user, and Delete user. I don't want to Delete inactive users - I just want to inactivate them.

Regards - Steve Janvrin.

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_]

Hello, @Steven Janvrin 

You most definitely CAN deactivate users in DC Jira. The options you referred to are the only ones under 3-dot "kebab" menu, indeed. However, if you click "Edit" on the user – you will see the "Active" checkbox. Uncheck – and your user will be deactivated.

This could be hidden when external user management is enabled or simply not work if your users are coming from the external directory (Crowd, LDAP, AD) and the directory is read-only. Most of these do support "local" user status but really as @Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ implied – such users should be deactivated at the source, or removed from the sync scope.

If you have many users to deal with, consider using our User Management for Jira app to do this all in bulk using Bulk User Actions. Even if this is just a one-off cleanup, feel free to use it on a trial license and save yourself some time.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our 24x7 support

[Felipe Perez _ServiceRocket_]

Hi Steve,

Good day to you! I'm Felipe from the ServiceRocket support team.

Regarding your question, yes, you can deactivate users in Jira Data Center, but the process differs slightly from Jira Cloud.
Instead of "deactivating" a user directly, you can disable their login access to prevent them from signing in while keeping their historical data intact.

These are the options you can apply:

• Remove them from all groups that grant login access
  1. Go to Administration > User Management
  2. Locate the user and click Edit User Groups
  3. Remove them from any group that grants access (e.g., jira-software-users, jira-users, confluence-users)
• Deactivate via an external directory (if applicable)
  1. If you use LDAP or another external directory, disable the user there.
• As Steven mentioned, you can follow the Atlassian official documentation to deactivate a User in Jira DC if the user is managed within your Jira instance.

Please note that Jira has no built-in "Deactivate" button, but removing login access achieves the same result without deleting their account or removing past activity.

Best Regards,
Felipe

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Hi @Steven Janvrin ,

Yes, you can deactivate a used on a DC instance. I would recommend checking official docs: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/create-edit-or-remove-a-user-938847025.html

However, this would apply if you have users in your local directory. If users are synced from IdP, then you would need to disable them there.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Tobi