Choosing which fields appear on your team's issues, and which of those are most important, can help your team get more done in less time. If there are a few fields you fill out for every bug, for example, it makes sense that those fields are always visible and probably somewhere towards the top of the issue view. If you're a project administrator, you can set up the issue view for your project in the way that works best for your team.

Issue layout settings are for individual projects. You can't share issue layout settings between project right now.

When choosing which fields to show and their position on the issue, you can also sort most issue fields into two categories—primary and secondary—to determine how they appear in different views. In addition to these categories, there's a special description fields area where you can reorder multi-line custom fields that usually appear on the left side of the issue.

1. Issue fields: Primary fields appear at the top of this section, above the Show more link.
2. Show more: Secondary fields are hidden behind this link when they're empty. When they have a value, they'll appear above Show more.
3. Configure issue layout: Click Configure to move and hide fields in the issue view.

Configure field layout for issue types

When configuring issue layout, you're configuring it for one or more issue types in a project. For example, when you configure the issue layout for bugs in a project, all bugs in that project will share that configuration.

1. Open an issue of the type you'd like to configure
2. Click Configure at the bottom-right of the issue (near the created and updated dates)
3. Add, remove, and drag fields in the field categories until you're happy with the setup.
4. Choose Save changes.

Field categories

Description area

This section is reserved for custom multi-line text fields, similar to the built-in description field. You can reorder or hide these fields, but you can't move them to the primary or secondary areas.

Primary fields

Primary fields are those fields that are important to most, if not all, issues of a particular type (stories or bugs, for example). They're always visible when you open the issue, and they might be fields you and your team update on a regular basis. They'll likely also be visible in other places in Jira, like when you're viewing an issue as a card on a board or in a queue.

Examples of primary fields could be things like assignee, component, and due date, but they can be any field you consider important enough to show on every issue of that type. You may also choose to make primary fields, required fields.

When you open an issue, primary fields are always shown in the issue's context area above the Show more link.

Secondary fields

Secondary fields are those that you'd fill in sometimes, to add a little extra context to the issue. When they're empty, they appear under the Show more link in the issue's context area; when you add a value to a secondary field, it moves to the bottom of the context area just above the Show more link.

Hidden fields

Fields can be available to use for an issue type, but not actually shown in the issue view. When configuring the layout for an issue type, drag fields to the right side of the screen and drop them in the Hidden fields section.

Add or remove fields from configuration

The available fields for an issue type are the ones added in the global screen configuration for viewing that issue type. To add more existing fields to an issue type, or create and manage field tabs, you need to visit that global configuration screen.

1. Choose Project settings > Screens

2. Click the > to expand the relevant screen scheme

3. Select the View issue screen

4. Add or remove the desired fields

If you're a Jira admin, there'll also be a link to the global screen configuration from the Issue layout page. To add fields that don't exist yet, see Adding, editing, and deleting a custom field.

Field tabs

You can arrange similar fields in tabs to save space in the issue view or keep certain fields grouped together. Tabs appear with other issue details and show the tab name and the first few fields in the tab. Click a tab to see and edit the fields inside.

You need to be a Jira admin to edit field tabs.

To add, edit, or remove tabs, and arrange fields in them:

1. Open an issue and choose ••• > Configure.
2. Click the link to the appropriate screen configuration at the top of the page.
3. Add, remove, and edit the field tabs.

Once you have tabs configured, you can edit or rearrange them by opening an issue and choosing ••• > Configure.

When you open an issue with tabs, they'll look something like this:

1. Field tab name
2. Fields in the tab