How to Filter Jira Worklogs by Custom Field

Most Jira teams rely on custom fields to classify their work — things like Story Type, Capability, Priority Category, or Business Unit. These fields are central to how product and engineering talk about the work. Yet when you open Jira's worklog reports, those fields simply don't exist. You can't filter by them, group by them, or slice your time data through them. The result: teams that care deeply about what kind of work time is spent on are left exporting to spreadsheets and building pivot tables by hand.

The Real Problem: Jira's Worklog Layer Doesn't Know About Your Custom Fields

Jira's built-in worklog reports — the ones accessible through Reports → Time Tracking or Board → Workload — were designed around a fixed set of standard fields: project, assignee, issue type, fix version, component, sprint. That's the entire menu.

Custom fields added by your admin — the ones that make your Jira actually reflect how your organisation thinks — are invisible to these reports. There is no filter chip for “Story Type = Feature”, no way to ask “how much time did the team log on Capability: Payments this sprint?” without leaving Jira entirely.

This is not a niche problem. Teams using Jira at scale almost always have at least one custom select or multiselect field that represents a meaningful business dimension — and they want their worklog data sliced by it.

What Jira Offers Natively

There are a few partial workarounds available inside Jira itself. None of them are clean, but it's worth understanding what's available before reaching for a third-party tool.

Option 1 — JQL + Manual Export

JQL supports custom fields via the cf[NNNN] syntax. You can write a query like:

cf[10234] = "Feature" AND worklogDate >= startOfWeek()

This gives you a list of issues matching that custom field value. The limitation: this is an issue filter, not a worklog filter. It tells you which issues were worked on — but it doesn't sum the time, break it down by user, or let you export worklog-level rows. You still need to click into each issue or export to CSV and massage the data.

Option 2 — Jira Dashboards with Gadgets

Jira's dashboard gadgets (like Workload Pie Chart or Time Since Chart) can visualise data from a saved filter. You can create a saved JQL filter scoped to a custom field value and pin a gadget to it.

The result is a rough visualisation of issue counts or story points — not logged hours. And gadgets are read-only: you cannot drill into worklog-level rows from them. It's useful for high-level issue volume tracking, but not for worklog reporting.

Option 3 — Jira Automation + Spreadsheet

Some teams build Jira Automation rules that trigger on worklog creation and write rows to a Google Sheet or send webhooks to a data warehouse. Combined with a spreadsheet pivot table, you can eventually get custom-field-aware worklog summaries.

This works — but it is a significant engineering investment to set up, fragile to maintain (automation rules break on schema changes), and produces results that are always one step removed from the Jira UI where your team already lives.

Option 4 — Advanced Roadmaps / Jira Plans (Premium)

Atlassian's premium-tier Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) supports grouping and filtering by custom fields in its timeline view. However, it is focused on capacity planning and scheduling — not worklog analysis. It does not show actual logged hours broken down by custom field value, and it requires the Jira Premium subscription tier.

How TimeEase Solves It Natively

TimeEase is a Jira Cloud app built around worklog data. It runs entirely inside your Jira instance — no external servers, no data leaving Atlassian's infrastructure. And it now supports filtering worklogs and timesheets directly by any single-select or multiselect custom field in your Jira instance.

The feature works the same way as all other TimeEase filters — as an interactive chip in the filter bar. You add it once, and it stays as part of your view until you remove it. No JQL required, no spreadsheet exports, no automation rules.

Step 1 — Add a Custom Field Filter

1. Open the Worklogs tab or the Timesheet tab in TimeEase.
2. Click Add Filter in the filter bar. The standard filter options appear (Project, User, Issue Type, etc.).
3. At the bottom of the list, click Filter by Custom Field →. A side panel opens showing all single-select and multiselect custom fields available in your Jira instance.
4. Click the field you want to filter by — for example, Story Type or Capability. A new filter chip appears in the filter bar.

Step 2 — Select Values

1. Click the new filter chip. A dropdown appears with all available option values for that field — automatically scoped to the projects you've already selected in the filter bar.
2. Select one or more values (e.g. Feature, Bug). The worklog data refreshes immediately to show only worklogs on issues matching those values.
3. You can add multiple custom field filters simultaneously — one chip per field — and combine them freely with all other standard filters.

Step 3 — Save as a Preset (Timesheet Tab)

If you use the Timesheet tab, custom field filters are fully included when you save a filter preset. The next time you load that preset — or share it with a colleague — the custom field chips are restored exactly as you left them, including the selected values. No re-configuration needed.

What You Can Now Answer

A few examples of questions that were previously impossible to answer directly in Jira:

• “How much time did the team log on Story Type = Feature vs. Bug this sprint?” — filter Worklogs by Sprint + Story Type, read the totals.
• “What did we actually spend on the Payments capability last month?” — filter Worklogs by Capability = Payments + date range, export to CSV.
• “Show me the timesheet for our platform team scoped to Priority Category = High.” — set up the filter on the Timesheet tab, save as a preset, share the preset with your manager.
• “How does time logged on internal tooling compare to product work this quarter?” — create two saved filter presets, one for each custom field value, compare the totals.

Which Custom Fields Are Supported?

TimeEase surfaces custom fields of these Jira schema types:

Text fields, date fields, number fields, user-picker fields, and cascading selects are not included in this release. The focus is on taxonomy fields — the ones your team uses to categorise work — which are almost universally single-select or multiselect in practice.

Summary

Jira's native worklog reports are built around a fixed set of standard fields and have no awareness of the custom fields your team uses to classify work. The available workarounds — JQL exports, dashboard gadgets, automation pipelines — all require manual effort and produce results outside the Jira interface where your team already works.

TimeEase's custom field filter lets you add any single-select or multiselect field as an interactive filter chip in the Worklogs and Timesheet tabs. Options are project-scoped, filters combine freely with all standard filters, and presets saved on the Timesheet tab include your custom field selections. It is the most direct path from “how much time did we spend on X?” to an answer — without leaving Jira.