How to Roll Up Logged Time and Estimates Into a Field You Can Filter On
Time tracking has the same hole as story points: Jira logs time per issue, but nothing adds it up the hierarchy into a field you can search, filter or put on a board. The built-in Time Spent field only reflects work logged directly on that issue — not its children — and there's no built-in field for a rolled-up original estimate either.
The free way: Automation, with a catch time doesn't share with story points
Time is stored in seconds, and the built-in Time Spent field isn't safe to overwrite with an Edit issue field action the way Story Points is — the safer pattern is a custom Number field (e.g. "Rollup: Hours") that you write into, leaving Jira's own time tracking untouched.
- Trigger: Work logged on the child issue (or value changed if you're rolling up estimates instead).
- Action: Lookup issues — JQL
parent = {{issue.key}}, or"Epic Link" = {{issue.key}}one level up for company-managed projects. - Action: Edit issue field on your custom Hours field with
{{lookupIssues.timespent.sum / 3600}}. Jira stores time tracking in seconds (smart values reference), so dividing by 3,600 converts the sum to hours. - Repeat one level up if the epic should carry the total too, chaining the rules the same way as in summing story points across a hierarchy.
For original estimate instead of logged time, swap timespent for
timeoriginalestimate in the smart value — same seconds-to-hours division.
Where it gets fragile
- The Work logged trigger fires on every worklog entry, not once a day — a chatty issue with lots of small log entries burns through your rule-run quota fast. The same monthly caps apply as for any other rule: 100 runs on Free, 1,700 on Standard, 1,000 per paid user on Premium (Atlassian's usage docs).
{{lookupIssues}}still tops out at 100 issues per lookup by default (performance guidelines), so a large epic needs its JQL narrowed or the limit raised where your plan allows it.- Mixing units is an easy, silent bug: two fields reporting the same rolled-up
quantity as
7and25200— hours in one, seconds in the other — will compare wrong the first time someone builds a filter or a dashboard gadget against them. Pick one unit, put it in the field name, and stay consistent.
When to stop maintaining rules by hand
The rules above are free and fine for one or two fields on a small hierarchy. Once you're rolling up several fields (hours, original estimate, a budget field of your own), chaining rules across more than two levels, or need issues without children to carry their own value instead of a blank, a dedicated rollup app removes the maintenance. TreeTotals rolls up both story points and time out of the box, always in hours, and lets you add rollups for any numeric field you track — without a rule to write or a unit to get wrong.