Documentation for JIRA 5.2. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

An issue's priority is its importance in relation to other issues.

JIRA ships with a set of default priorities. You can modify these or add your own as follows.

Defining a new priority

  1. Log in as a user with the JIRA Administrators global permission.
  2. Choose Administration at the top right of your screen. Then choose Issues > Priorities to open the 'View Priorities' page, which lists the currently-defined priorities and the Add New Priority form.
    (tick) Keyboard shortcut: g + g + start typing priorities
  3. Complete the Add New Priority  form towards the end of the page:
    • Name — specify a word or two to describe your new priority. (This name will appear in the dropdown field when a user creates or edits an issue).
    • Description — add a sentence or two to describe when this priority should be used.
    • Icon URL — supply the path of a image that has been placed somewhere inside <jira-application-dir>/images/icons of your JIRA Installation Directory or from an accessible URL.
    • Priority Color — specify a colour to represent this priority. You can either type the HTML colour code, or click the box at the right of the field to select from a colour chart.
  4. Click the Add button.

On this page:

Editing a priority

  1. Go to the View Priorities page as described in Adding a priority (above).
  2. Click the Edit link (in the Operations) column corresponding to the priority you wish to edit.
  3. Update the fields as described under Defining a new priority (above), then click the Update button.

Re-ordering priorities

Re-ordering priorities changes the order in which they appear in the drop-down list when a user creates or edits an issue.

  1. Go to the View Priorities page as described in Adding a priority (above).
  2. To re-order the priorities, click the arrows in the Order  column:
    • Click the up-arrow to move a priority higher up in the list.
    • Click the down-arrow to move a priority lower down in the list.

Translating priorities

To translate your priorities into another language, please see Translating Resolutions, Priorities, Statuses and Issue Types.

Deleting a priority

  1. Go to the View Priorities page as described in steps 1-4 of Adding a priority (above).
  2. Click the Delete link (in the Operations column) corresponding to the priority you wish to delete.

2 Comments

  1. Rob Bednark

    "Choose Administration at the top right of your screen."

    I'm not seeing this "Administration". My admin put me in the "Jira-Administrators" group, and I logged-out and logged-in, but don't see it.  Is there a particular page I need to be on?  Could someone please post a screenshot showing the "Administration" link?

    1. Rob Bednark

      I got it now.  My admin needed to re-sync Directory Services.  Here's a screenshot showing the Administration link.