Approvals that keep work moving

New: bring formal sign-off into every workflow

Some work simply can’t move forward without the right approval – a feature launch, a budget increase, a contract review, a production change. With Approvals, now available in both team-managed and company-managed spaces, you can add structured, auditable approval steps directly into your workflows so decisions are clear, accountable, and never buried in comments or email threads.

How it works

Add approval steps

Make approvals part of your process by adding dedicated approval steps to your workflows instead of relying on “In review” statuses or ad-hoc comments. Teams can instantly see where work is waiting on sign-off and what needs to happen before it moves forward.

Request sign-off from the right stakeholders

Get quick, clear decisions from the people who matter. For each approval step, you can define a single approver, a group, or multiple approvers across functions like Engineering, Finance, or Legal. Jira handles the requests and captures decisions, reducing back-and-forth and avoiding lost approvals in email or chat.

Create a clear audit trail for every decision

Know who decided what – and when. Every approval is logged on the work item showing who approved or rejected and when. This gives you a reliable audit trail for compliance, change control, and post-incident reviews. Because approval data is available via JQL, you can also report on approvals across projects to spot bottlenecks and trends.

Replace workarounds with a purpose-built solution

Move away from makeshift “approvals” via comments, @mentions, or custom fields. With a dedicated approval process, responsibilities are clearer, key checkpoints are consistently followed, and teams gain confidence that critical work has the right sign-off before it ships.

Get started with approvals

Approvals are available for Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise customers.

For Jira admins:

• Open your workflow editor for a project and add an Approval step

• Configure who can approve at each step and how many approvals are needed before the work item can transition, so the process matches your existing controls and policies

Get started

Learn more