Stanki Guild

Guide · Jira

Jira approvals when the approver is out of office

Approval Flow for Jira 3.0.0 is the production version (30 October 2026). Last updated 1 November 2026. On the Atlassian Marketplace.

By Bartosz Stankiewicz, founder, Stanki Guild.

The approver is on leave, the request is waiting, and the work cannot move. Jira's approval step does not have a way for the approver to hand their decision to someone else for a few days.

What Atlassian says

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The request is JSDCLOUD-7867, "Delegation of approval rights". On 30 October 2026 it had 255 votes, the status "Future Consideration" and had been open since 2018-12-20. The description: "It would be great to have the ability to set a temporary approver in such scenarios." It is filed against Jira Service Management. A Community article on multi-level approvals (Multi-level approvals in Jira) says the same: "there's no built-in delegation or "backup approver" for when someone is on holiday". The text of Atlassian's support page on approvals in Jira work items, which we saved on 30 October 2026, does not mention delegation.

Confluence has the same gap. A newer request, CONFCLOUD-85363 (11 votes, created 2026-10-28), says "Customers cannot configure an approval threshold, quorum, or backup/delegate approver model."

What you can do with native approvals

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  • Name more than one approver so no single person is a bottleneck. This only helps when one of them is enough.
  • Change the approvers before the leave starts. It works, but it depends on someone remembering, and it changes the record of who was asked.

Where this breaks: both put the work on the person who administers the approval, and neither leaves a record that a decision was made on someone's behalf.

Option: an out-of-office substitute in Approval Flow

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In the panel, each person can open My out-of-office substitute, name one substitute and give a date range (From and Until, whole days in UTC, inclusive). While the range is active, the substitute can approve or reject on requirements where the person is a named approver.

  • The receipt records both people: "X on behalf of Y".
  • The decision counts as Y's sign-off for the quorum and for separation of duties.
  • Only you can set or clear your own substitute.
  • A substitute who approves a requirement that needs a comment must add the comment too.

Where this breaks: it applies to named approvers. If a requirement is approved by a group or a project role, there is no single person to substitute for. And it covers one substitute per person, not a chain.

What we have not shown live yet

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Substitutes are described in our documentation and covered by tests. We have not run one on a live site, so we show no screenshot here.

Common questions

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Does the substitute need to be in the approver list?

No. The substitute acts on behalf of a named approver for the dates chosen. The receipt shows who actually clicked.

Can an approver delegate for one work item only?

No. The substitute is set per person, for a date range, and covers every requirement where that person is a named approver.

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