Time logged per epic in Jira, sub-tasks included

How much time went into an epic last month? On Atlassian Community it reads “we are looking for options to check how much effort in one epic or story has been spent for a month” (Community, June 2026). Jira keeps every worklog, on the epic’s stories and on their sub-tasks, and has no figure that adds them up for a month. This page shows what Jira adds up by itself, how far a search goes, then what Logline does.

What Jira adds up by itself

• Time spent on an issue is every worklog on that issue, from any date and by anyone. It leaves out the issue’s children.
• Σ Time Spent adds an issue’s sub-tasks to its own time. On an epic in a company-managed space it does not add the epic’s stories; the request to change that, JSWCLOUD-18871, has been open since 2020.
• The issue view adds time one level up the hierarchy. Atlassian’s note of 3 June 2025 on JRACLOUD-70150 says the roll-up “doesn’t go beyond that”, so the time on the sub-tasks under an epic’s stories does not reach the epic.
• Each of these is all-time. They say how much went into the epic since its first worklog, and nothing about last month.

A search for one epic

JQL finds the epic’s stories with time logged in a month. The parent field finds an issue’s direct children, in team-managed and company-managed spaces alike (JQL fields):

parent = ACME-1 AND worklogDate >= 2026-09-01 AND worklogDate <= 2026-09-30

Sub-tasks are one level further down, so they need a second search over the stories’ keys:

parent in (ACME-2, ACME-3) AND worklogDate >= 2026-09-01 AND worklogDate <= 2026-09-30

Both lists show each issue’s all-time Time spent beside it. The month’s hours come from the worklogs themselves: each issue’s worklogs from GET /rest/api/3/issue/{issueIdOrKey}/worklog with startedAfter and startedBefore (Atlassian), added up by epic in a spreadsheet, every month. Export Jira worklogs to Excel walks through the spreadsheet route.

With Logline

Logline is our app. It puts every worklog under its epic as it reads them, the sub-tasks under each story included:

1. Open Apps › Logline and pick Last month, or a custom range of up to 400 days under More periods.
2. Set Rows to Epic and Then by to Issue. Columns on Auto gives a column per week for a month and a column per month for a quarter or a year; Month splits any period by month.
3. Each epic’s row holds the time logged in the period on the epic, its stories and their sub-tasks. Time on issues with no epic is under No epic.
4. The arrow on an issue’s row lists its worklogs, with each comment.
5. Save the report and Share it, or put it on a dashboard with the Logline gadget.

To follow one epic, open its Logline panel: who logged time on the epic and its children, week by week, against the estimate, with its children’s estimates added in. Open in the report opens the epic and its children over every day they were logged on.

A worklog on a sub-task counts on the sub-task’s own row and under its epic, through its story, so the epic’s figure and the issues’ figures add up to the same total. Making the totals match Jira’s time spent works an issue and its sub-task through hour by hour. For a space’s hours month by month, see Hours logged in a Jira space per month. More on the Logline home page.