The two different things people mean
Search the Chrome Web Store for Jira and time and you will get dozens of results. Nearly all of them answer a question you did not ask.
Time logging is how long you worked on an issue. A timer you start and stop, or a form that writes hours into the worklog. Clockify, Toggl integrations, Jira Assistant, and most of the extensions with "time tracker" in the name are this. They are useful, and they depend entirely on somebody remembering to press the button.
Time in status is how long the issue sat in a status or a board column, whether or not anybody touched it. Nobody has to remember anything, because Jira has already recorded it: every status transition is stored in the issue's change history with a timestamp. The data exists on day one; it is simply never shown to you.
If you want to know where work is stuck rather than how many hours someone billed, you want the second kind — and there are far fewer of them than the search results suggest.
What is actually available
The honest summary of the extension channel, as of late 2026: it is thin. A few things exist, and they are not equivalent.
- Dot replacers. The smallest category. Jira's own "Days in column" draws one grey dot per day on a card; an extension can swap those dots for a readable number. That is a genuine improvement in legibility and nothing more — it inherits every limitation of the underlying feature, including the one that matters most, which is that it resets whenever an issue comes back to a column. At least one such extension exists but has not been updated since 2022, which is worth knowing before you rely on it.
- Multi-tool extensions. Several general-purpose Jira extensions include a status-duration feature among a dozen unrelated ones — ticket pinning, copying, tree views, worklog upload. If you want the other eleven features, that is a reasonable trade. If you want this one, you are installing a lot of surface area to get it.
- Dedicated time in status extensions. The rarest kind: something that reads the change history and reports time per status, with the arithmetic done properly. This is the category our own extension is in, and we will not pretend to be neutral about it — see the end of this page.
What to check before installing any of them
You are about to give something access to your company's issue tracker. Four questions are worth two minutes each.
- Which permissions does it ask for? An extension that only needs your Jira site will say so. One that asks to read and change data on all sites can see your email, your bank and everything else, and the store listing has to disclose that.
- Does anything leave the browser? Time in status can be computed entirely on your machine — the data is already in the page and in Jira's API, and the maths is subtraction. If an extension asks you to create an account or sign in, your issue data is going somewhere, and you should know where before your security team asks.
- When was it last updated? Jira's interface changes often, and an extension that injects into it needs maintaining. An extension untouched for two years is not stable, it is abandoned.
- Does it handle round trips? This is the one that separates a real implementation from a quick one. If an issue goes to review, gets rejected, and comes back, does the tool report the total across all visits, or just the latest one? Jira's own feature reports the latest one, which is exactly backwards: the issues that bounce are the ones you most need to see.
The option that costs nothing
Before installing anything, it is worth knowing you can get the same answer by hand. Open any issue and expand History. Every status change is there with a timestamp, and the gap between two of them is the time in that status.
That is accurate, free, needs no permissions and no admin. It also stops being practical at about the fifth issue, which is the entire reason anybody builds a tool for it. If you have one suspicious ticket, use the history. If you have a board, you want something that does the subtraction for you.
The other free routes — JQL, dashboards, automation, the control chart — each answer part of the question and fail at a different point. They are compared properly in time in status without a marketplace app.
Why an extension rather than a Marketplace app
There are a dozen mature Time in Status apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, and several of them are very good. They are also a different purchase.
A Marketplace app is installed by a Jira admin for the whole site, and is usually priced for every user on that site — so on a 200-person instance where one delivery lead needs the report, somebody is paying for 200 seats. A browser extension installs for the person who wants it, in about ten seconds, with no ticket to IT and no procurement.
If your team is under ten people, note that most Marketplace apps are free at that size and richer than any extension. The extension argument is not price — it is that nobody has to approve it.
Ours
We build one, so treat this section accordingly. TimeInColumn for Jira shows how long each issue has been in its current status on the board, and a report with the full breakdown per status.
- Round trips count. Total time across every visit to a status, not just the latest one.
- Working hours are optional. Exclude weekends and holidays on whichever days your team actually works.
- Nothing leaves your browser. There is no server, no account and no analytics — not as a policy, but as an architecture. Your issue data has nowhere to go.
- No admin. You install it yourself.
See how it works or install it now