Confusion with statusReference when creating workflows via REST API

[Subrat Bera]

Hi Community,
I’m working with the Jira Cloud REST API v3 to create workflows using:

POST /rest/api/3/workflows/create

The workflow payload requires statusReference for each status, for example:

"statuses": [
  {
    "id": "Done",
    "statusReference": "6b3fc04d-3316-46c5-a257-65751aeb8849"
  }
]

The problem:

When creating a new status via POST /rest/api/3/status, Jira returns a statusReference, but in numeric form:

"statusReference": "10003"

However, when creating a workflow, Jira expects a UUID format (e.g., 6b3fc04d-3316-46c5-a257-65751aeb8849) for statusReference, not the numeric one.

f the status already exists, fetching it with GET /rest/api/3/status or GET /rest/api/3/statuses/search does not return any statusReference at all (the UUID form).

This leads to two blocking issues:

We cannot reuse existing statuses in new workflows (since their UUID-style statusReference cannot be retrieved).

If we try to create a status with the same name, the API rejects it because it already exists.

My questions:

Is there a way to fetch the correct statusReference (UUID form) for existing statuses?

Why does Jira return a numeric statusReference on creation, but expects a UUID when creating workflows? Is this a bug or by design?

Is the only workaround really to maintain our own mapping of status → statusReference when creating statuses, or to delete/recreate them just to get the UUID?

Why this matters:

Without access to the correct statusReference values, it’s impossible to automate workflow creation with existing statuses. This creates major problems when:

Some statuses are pre-existing in Jira.

We need to reuse them across workflows.

We cannot recreate them because of name conflicts.

Right now, we’re blocked because /workflows/create requires statusReference, but Jira provides no way to fetch it for existing statuses.

Has anyone else faced this? Any workarounds or insights from Atlassian would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!

[Mohamed Benziane]

Hi,

Welcome to the community

You can define the uuid yourself, even for existing status
Feedback: Bulk create workflows - Jira Development / Jira Cloud - The Atlassian Developer Community