Billable hours in Jira, without a billable field
Checked against Atlassian’s documentation on 7 October 2026.
An agency or a consultancy bills clients from the hours its people log in Jira, and not every hour is billable: internal work, support rotas, fixing your own mistakes. Jira worklogs have no billable flag, and Jira has no hourly rates. This page shows how teams mark billable work with Jira’s own tools, where each way stops, then what Logline does.
Marking billable work in Jira
There are three common ways, each on the issue or the worklog:
- A label on the issue, such as
billable, or a separate epic per client. JQL then finds the billable issues:labels = billable AND worklogDate >= 2026-09-01 AND worklogDate <= 2026-09-30. - A field on the issue, such as a select field “Billable” with Yes and No, or a Client field. People pick it when they create the issue, and a JQL search on it works the same way.
- A word in the worklog comment, such as “[billable]”. JQL can
search worklog comments with
worklogComment ~ "billable". It marks each worklog rather than the issue, but only if everyone types it, every time.
Where they stop:
- Children are not marked. A label on the client’s epic does not reach its stories and sub-tasks, and that is where people log time. So either everyone labels every issue, or an Automation rule copies the label down.
- The hours are all-time. A search finds the right issues, but the Time Spent beside each one is its whole history, from every author, not the month you are invoicing.
- No amounts. Jira has no rates, so hours times rate, per client or per person, is a spreadsheet step every month, after splitting the export’s worklog cells into rows (Export Jira worklogs to Excel).
With Logline
Logline is our app. A Jira admin sets one billable rule and the hourly rates once, in Jira settings › Apps › Logline settings, and every report then shows billable hours and their amount.
Billable time, one rule for the site:
- Issues with a label, such as billable, in any letter case;
- Issues with a field value: a select, radio, checkbox or labels field, and the values that mean billable;
- Issues matching JQL, such as
labels = billable OR component = Consulting. Jira checks the query when it is saved, so a typo is refused rather than counting nothing. - Also count issues whose parent or epic matches: label the client’s epic once, and the stories and sub-tasks under it count as billable.
Hourly rates: a default, rates by space and rates by person, in one currency. A space’s rate wins over a person’s, and a person’s over the default, so a client space can carry its contract rate.
What each report then shows:
- Under the total, the billable figure and its amount: billable hours, of how many hours in all, and what they come to.
- Billable and Amount columns on every row and on the totals row. With Rows on Space, then Epic, that is hours and amount per client and per piece of work.
- In the Worklogs view, Billable only keeps the billable worklogs, with each one’s rate and amount, ready to go with the invoice.
- Download Excel and Download CSV carry the Billable (h) and Amount columns.
- Billable hours with no rate (none for its space or person, and no default) are counted and named in a note under the report, never priced at zero.
A worked example: the rule is the label billable, counted from the parent or epic too, and the Acme Website space has a rate of 150 an hour. A developer logs 6h on a story under the epic labelled billable. The story carries no label of its own, but it counts as billable through its epic, so the report adds 6h to the billable hours and 900 to Acme’s amount, at the space’s rate rather than the developer’s own. An hour on an internal space with no label counts in the total and not in the billable figure.
Who sees what: everyone who can open a report sees its amounts, and the report prints the billable rule and the rates rule under its total. Only Jira admins see or change the rates themselves; a report receives only the rates of its own spaces and people. Logline reads, it never writes: the rule marks hours in its reports, not on your issues.
Every setting is described in Settings. For the worklog-by-worklog list behind an invoice, see Export Jira worklogs to Excel. More on the Logline home page.
