Jira Cloud to reject user-property JQL on voters, watchers, creators

Jira Cloud to reject user-property JQL on voters, watchers, creators

7 October 2026: Atlassian is deprecating Jira Cloud JQL searches that use user entity properties on the voter, watcher and creator fields. From 16 November 2026 such queries, and API requests that contain them, will be rejected with an UnsupportedOperationException instead of returning results.

Not yet independently verified. The changelog calls 16 November 2026 the deprecation date and mentions a removal date without giving a separate one, so we have treated 16 November as the cut-off. We have not tested which queries are affected. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Which searches stop working on 16 November

The notice appeared in the Jira Cloud platform changelog on 7 October 2026, under the heading of deprecating user entity property searches for voters, watchers and creators. Atlassian gives 16 November 2026 as the deprecation date and mentions removal without a separate date. After that point a query that reaches into a user property on one of those three fields is rejected.

Searches that use user entity properties on the assignee and reporter fields are not affected. The changelog says they remain fully supported, so a filter on a property of the person an issue is assigned to or reported by carries on as before.

Who is likely to meet the change

The people most likely to meet the change are the ones who never wrote the query. Marketplace apps and in-house integrations sometimes store a value against a user, such as a team, a region or a cost centre, and then filter issues by that property on the person who created, watches or voted for them. Saved filters, dashboards and automation rules built on those apps would break on the cut-off date, and so would any script that sends the JQL through the REST API.

Three places to move the data

Atlassian asks teams to review their apps and integrations and move the data to one of three places, depending on what the data is for.

• Custom fields, when the data has to stay searchable through core JQL.
• Issue entity properties, when the data is scoped to a single issue.
• App-managed storage, when the data belongs to an app and does not need native JQL support.

Our issue tracking software category lists five products and our project management software category lists 17.

Equals now means a phrase: the 6 October text change

A day earlier, on 6 October, the changelog recorded a different change to text fields. The =, IN and NOT IN operators used to require an exact match of the whole field value, so a query for urgent matched only a field holding the single word. They now perform an exact phrase search, in line with the ~ operator used with escaped quotes, so the same query matches an issue containing "urgent issue" or "very urgent issue".

Atlassian's examples show the limits. A query for "alpha beta" matches "prefix alpha beta suffix" but not "beta alpha", because phrases must appear in the same word order. A list such as IN ("alpha beta", "urgent") matches either phrase anywhere in the text. Matching stays case-insensitive and stemmed, so "run" may match "running" or "ran".

Reviewing filters before the cut-off

For the 6 October change Atlassian recommends three steps. Review saved filters, dashboard gadgets and automation rules that use =, IN or NOT IN on text fields, because they may now return broader results. Use the ~ operator, without escaped quotes, when word order does not matter. Update internal documentation to say that = now performs a phrase search on text fields.

The 16 November change has no equivalent workaround in the changelog: the queries are rejected, and the three storage options above are the stated way forward.

Company profile on TrustList: Atlassian

Related on TrustList:

• Atlassian fixes critical file-read flaw in its Data Center products

Sources

• Atlassian Developer: Jira Cloud platform changelog, 7 October 2026 entry on deprecating user entity property searches, 7 October 2026