JQL Dates: Formats, Relative Dates and startOfDay() Tested

The stand-up filter says created >= -1d. At 9:30 on Friday it shows one new bug, and the team moves on. The bugs that came in on Thursday before 9:30 are not on the screen. -1d does not mean “yesterday”. It means “the last 24 hours, counted back from this minute”.

Jira’s date handling has about six rules like that, and they are scattered across a dozen pages of Atlassian’s reference. We put them on one page and measured each on a live Jira Cloud site on Friday 13 November 2026, at 10:45 in the morning, with the profile time zone set to Central Europe.

The formats Jira accepts

There are four, and Jira lists them itself when you get one wrong. Our created > "11/01/2026" came back with:

Date value '11/01/2026' for field 'created' is invalid. Valid formats include: 'yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm', 'yyyy/MM/dd', 'yyyy-MM-dd', or a period format e.g. '-5d', '4w 2d'.

The time is read in your time zone. Atlassian’s field reference says results “will be relative to your configured time zone (which is by default the Jira server’s time zone)”. Two people in different countries can run one saved filter and get different lists.

Relative dates count hours, not days

-1d, -2w, -4h and -30m are periods counted back from now. The units are w, d, h and m, and on the start and end functions also M (months) and y (years). On our site, at 10:45 on Friday:

The same gap shows up over a week: created >= -1w found 65 work items, created >= startOfDay(-7) found 74. Use a period when you mean “the last N hours or days”, like an SLA or a “stale for two weeks” check (updated <= -2w). Use a function when you mean a calendar day, week or month, like a stand-up or a monthly report.

Two traps with numbers: no unit, and no quotes

Atlassian’s reference says the default unit is minutes, and that “if you omit the quote-marks, the number you supply will be interpreted as milliseconds after epoch (1970-1-1)”. Both are true, and together they make a quiet mess:

No error, no warning. A filter with a missing d returns the whole site, and a dashboard gadget on it shows a number that looks plausible. Always write the unit; then quotes do not matter (due <= 7d and due <= "7d" both found 48).

Never use = on created, updated or resolved

These fields hold a date and a time. A date without a time means midnight, so = only matches work items created at exactly 00:00:

The last one is the form for “on this day”: from midnight, to before the next midnight.

Due dates have no time

The due date is a plain date. Atlassian: “the due date relates to the date only (not to the time)”. So due = "2026-11-20" works (2 work items on our site), and due = startOfDay() finds what is due today (5). Adding a time does not fail, it quietly finds nothing: due = "2026-11-20 10:00" returned 0.

due < now() and due < startOfDay() both returned 20 open, overdue items for us. They differ in one case: on the day itself, after midnight, due < now() already counts today’s work as overdue. More on how Jira treats deadlines is in Jira deadlines.

All eight start and end functions

startOfDay, startOfWeek, startOfMonth, startOfYear and the matching endOf functions work on created, due, resolved, updated and date custom fields. Each takes an optional shift in brackets:

Only one shift per function. startOfWeek("-1w +1d") fails with Duration for function 'startOfWeek' should have the format (+/-)n(yMwdm), e.g -1M for 1 month earlier. There is also no quarter function: startOfQuarter() returns Unable to find JQL function 'startOfQuarter()'.

Two more date functions are handy for personal filters: currentLogin() (the start of your current session) and lastLogin() (your previous one), as in updated > lastLogin().

Which day does the week start on?

Sunday, by default. Atlassian’s functions page: “this function considers Sunday to be the first day of the week when ISO8601 for the Date Picker is disabled in Look and feel settings.” A Jira admin can switch to ISO weeks there. Without that, shift by a day:

The one-item difference on our site was a work item created on Sunday 1 November: in a Sunday week it belongs to last week, in a Monday week to the week before.

Ready-made periods

Swap created for resolved or updated as needed. To ask when something changed (moved to Done last month, reassigned this week) you need CHANGED with DURING or AFTER, covered in JQL WAS and CHANGED.

Sprint dates are not dates in JQL

One date people ask for is missing from Jira entirely: the sprint’s start and end. sprint in openSprints() tells you a work item is in a running sprint, not when that sprint ends. Our app JQL Blocks adds Sprint start date, Sprint end date and Sprint complete date as real Jira fields, so "Sprint end date" < now() AND statusCategory != Done works in a filter, a board or Automation.

Check a query before you save it

Paste any date query into the free JQL builder: it flags day-first dates and spells out each clause in words (“Created is on or after the start of yesterday”). For every other field, operator and function, see the JQL cheat sheet.

How we tested

• Site: our Jira Cloud test site, 162 work items, profile time zone Europe/Belgrade (CET).
• When: Friday 13 November 2026, from 10:45. Relative results depend on the minute you run them; the work items in the timeline were created on 11 and 12 November.
• How: each query through POST /rest/api/3/jql/parse?validation=strict, then counted with POST /rest/api/3/search/approximate-count.
• Reference: Atlassian’s JQL fields page (created, due, resolved, updated) and JQL functions page (startOfDay to endOfYear, currentLogin, lastLogin), read the same day.