Change Locale for Jira server

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Overview

Some of the functionalities in JIRA depends on the locale that is set for the JAVA environment. For example the function startOfWeek in JIRA JQL Queries (Advanced Searching). The default value of locale settings will be picked up from the locale settings set in the operating system.

Changing the Locale

In order to change the locale settings the recommended way is to add the additional arguments user.language and user.country to the JVM parameters. The details steps for adding the parameters to JIRA is explained in this article - Setting Properties and Options on Startup

An example for setting the locale to Germany is given below:

1 -Duser.language=de -Duser.country=DE

ℹ️ The Internationalization: Understanding Locale in the Java Platform documentation from Oracle contains further information on the different codes to be set for language and country codes.

Commonly used Locales

Commonly used language codes:

Language

Code

Arabic

ar

German

de

English

en

Spanish

es

Japanese

ja

Hebrew

he

Examples of commonly used Country codes:

Country

Code

United States

US

Australia

AU

Canada

CA

France

FR

Japan

JP

Germany

DE

Updated on April 8, 2025

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