Subject: Clarification on Impact of “Issues → Work Items” Change on REST APIs

[sarvesh]

Hello Atlassian Support Team,

We’ve noticed that Jira Cloud has started changing terminology from “Issues” to “Work Items” in the UI.

We rely heavily on the Jira Cloud REST APIs, especially endpoints such as:

/rest/api/3/issue
JQL queries using issueType, issue.status, etc.
Webhooks and automation rules that reference issues

Can you please confirm the following:

1. Will there be any change in the REST API field names or response payloads (e.g., issue, fields.issueType, etc.) due to this UI update?
2. Will existing JQL queries, automation rules, and dashboards that use the word “issue” continue to work as-is?
3. Are there any upcoming API version changes or deprecations planned related to this terminology update?
4. Will Atlassian eventually expose “Work Items” in the API, or is it only a frontend label change?

We want to ensure that our custom integrations and connectors continue working smoothly without needing code changes.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @sarvesh 

I will try to address your questions in order:

1. This is better explained in Work is the new collective term for items tracked in Jira - Atlassian Developer Community Essentials, there are no changed to existing APIs.
2. Yes, those all should continue to work.  There are aliases in place to prevent these from breaking as a result of the change.
3. To the best of my knowledge there are no such deprecation coming to the API at the moment.
4. It is only a front end change that has been rolled out at this time.  There are no plans currently to change this in the API.

I hope this helps to clarify the change.

Andy

[Hans Polder _Devoteam_]

Hi Sarvesh,

Excellent question. I was wondering the same thing. As most of us here are not working for Atlassian (we are mostly users or admins just like you), I have asked someone from Atlassian Support to provide a more formal answer on this.