Roll up story points in Jira without Premium

Short answer: no, you do not need Jira Premium to roll up story points across the Jira hierarchy. What Premium sells is Plans — a planning tool that rolls up estimates and dates inside a plan — plus the right to add hierarchy levels above epic. The hierarchy itself, the parent field that ties sub-tasks to stories and stories to epics, exists on every Jira Cloud plan, and so do the numbers on the issues. What Standard and Free lack is a place where those numbers are added up through the tree. This guide lays out what Premium adds, what you already have, and the Standard-plan way to get the totals onto a dashboard.

Two notes on words. Jira Cloud comes in four plans — Free, Standard, Premium and Enterprise (Explore Jira Cloud plans, Jira pricing) — and “Premium” below means Premium or Enterprise. And Atlassian’s documentation now says work item where most Jira users, and this page, still say issue.

What Premium adds for rollups

Three separate things, and it is worth separating them because most teams want only one.

1. Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps). Plans combines work from several boards, projects and filters into one planning view with scheduling, capacity and dependencies. Atlassian’s overview states that Plans is included with Jira Premium, and the page header says the feature is only available on Premium and Enterprise (What are plans in Jira Premium?).

2. Hierarchy levels above epic. Out of the box Jira has three levels: Subtask (level −1), Story (level 0) and Epic (level 1). Adding a level above Epic — an initiative, say — “is only available as part of Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise” (Configure the work type hierarchy). One detail matters later: a level created during a Premium period does not vanish when the plan changes. Atlassian’s KB on the “Need Premium subscription to set parent” error describes exactly that situation — the custom hierarchy is preserved after the Premium subscription ends, but can no longer be configured or used to set new parents.

3. Roll-ups inside the plan. In a plan you can switch on roll-ups so that a parent infers its dates, estimates, releases, sprints and teams from its children, from the View settings menu (What are roll-ups in my plan?). Rolled-up estimates are rounded to one decimal place for story points and two for hours and days (How your plan rolls up estimates). Two things to know about them: they live in the plan’s timeline view, not on a dashboard; and they are planning values — Atlassian notes that rolled-up dates are not saved to the work items when you commit changes back to Jira.

So Premium gives you a hierarchy deeper than epic and a planning screen where the tree is summed. It does not put the total on a dashboard, and the rolled-up numbers stay in the plan.

What Standard and Free already have

Sprint totals in the backlog. Once a Scrum board estimates in story points or time, the backlog shows a total per sprint (Enable estimation). One sprint, one board, no hierarchy.

The epic panel and the epic report. Both look at one epic at a time. The backlog’s epic panel expands an epic’s details on that board (Manage epics in a scrum space); the epic report “shows a list of complete, incomplete, and unestimated work items in an epic” and applies to Scrum boards only (View and understand the epic report). Useful for the epic in front of you; nothing for the thirty epics across four teams.

Dashboard statistics gadgets. Two Dimensional Filter Statistics (“Displays tabular data based on a filter”), Work item Statistics and the Pie Chart gadget all break a filter’s issues down by a field — and they count issues. None of the built-in gadgets sums a numeric field (Dashboard gadgets). If the question is “how many”, they answer it; if it is “how many points”, they do not.

Automation. This is the real Standard-plan rollup. Atlassian’s KB Sum up story points and display value in parent work item uses the smart value {{lookupIssues.Story Points.sum}} to write the total of an epic’s stories into a number field on the epic whenever a story is created or edited. The template library’s Sum up story points and keep parent and subtask in sync does the sub-task → parent step with {{issue.subtasks.Story Points.sum}}, and a further KB covers epics → initiative. It works, with four costs:

• One rule per level. Sub-task → story, story → epic, epic → initiative are three rules, each maintained separately.
• It recalculates only when a rule fires. With the rule as written in the KB, an edit updates the parent of the issue that triggered it; the epic a story just left keeps its old sum until one of its remaining stories is edited.
• Every run is metered. Automation has a monthly allowance that refreshes each month and is smaller on Free and Standard than on Premium (How is your automation usage calculated). A busy multi-project rule can spend it.
• The sum becomes a field. A number stored on the epic looks exactly like an estimate to every other report, so a tool that later sums epics and stories together counts the same points twice.

What each option can and cannot do

Option	Plan	Sums a field?	Follows the hierarchy?	Across projects?	Shows where
Sprint totals in the backlog	Free, Standard	Yes — one sprint	No	One board	Backlog
Epic panel, epic report	Free, Standard	Progress of one epic; the report lists done, incomplete and unestimated issues	One epic at a time	One board	Backlog, reports
Statistics gadgets (Two Dimensional Filter Statistics, Work item Statistics, Pie Chart)	Free, Standard	No — counts issues	No	Yes, any filter	Dashboard
Automation rule	Free, Standard (metered)	Yes — written into a field on the parent	One level per rule, when the rule fires	With multi-project rules	The parent issue
Plans with roll-ups	Premium, Enterprise	Yes — estimates and dates, inside the plan	Yes, including levels above epic	Yes	The plan’s timeline (rolled-up dates are not saved to the issues on commit)
Hierarchy Totals gadget	Standard, Premium, Enterprise (Free untested)	Yes — sum, avg, min, max, count or median of a number field or a time field	Every level of the parent field, including levels above epic where they exist	Up to 50 projects per gadget	Dashboard

Hierarchy Totals: the Standard-plan option

Hierarchy Totals is a Jira Cloud dashboard gadget by Claused, on the Atlassian Marketplace. It follows Jira’s parent field and only that — the same field on every plan — so on Standard it rolls sub-task → story → epic, and on a site that has levels above epic, whether configured on Premium or kept from a Premium period, those levels appear as parents like any other. It does not follow issue links and it does not need Plans.

What you configure. Up to 50 projects; a number-type custom field such as Story point estimate, or one of Original estimate, Time spent and Remaining estimate shown in hours; one of sum, avg, min, max, count or median; an optional JQL filter of up to 500 characters; and Open work only, which drops issues whose status category is Done — the same as statusCategory != Done. How rollups work writes down the rules: every row aggregates itself plus everything below, averages divide by estimated issues only, and a median is taken over the whole subtree rather than over sub-totals.

What you read. The Σ column carries the total on every row; the DONE column shows, on parent rows, the share of the work under the row that is done; an amber unest. badge counts the unestimated leaves below a row; on a parent row, clicking it narrows the tree to those branches. Issues whose parent is outside the gadget’s scope are gathered under No parent in view (four or more per project; fewer are listed as top-level rows — see how rollups work), so nothing is silently dropped or double-counted.

Where the numbers come from. The tile reads a stored copy of your issues that the app keeps inside your Atlassian site: a full re-read of every configured project once a day, at an hour the Forge platform picks, with an hourly update in between. The first pass after you save takes minutes to an hour or more on a large site, and the gadget shows a bounded live preview meanwhile. Because the tile reads a prepared result, a 31,000-issue portfolio renders in about 1.5 seconds and a 13-project, 47,000-issue portfolio in under 3 seconds — both are render times of the stored copy, up to 50,000 issues per render (measured performance). The footer’s data as of stamp says how fresh the numbers are, and because totals are captured every day the gadget can draw a trend per project from the second day on. The freshness and performance doc has the details.

Who sees what. Every viewer sees only the projects they can browse and the issues their issue security allows; hidden projects are reported as hidden, never shown, and the trend is withheld when issue security hides issues in scope. The app has read-only scopes, stores its data in Forge-hosted storage inside your Atlassian site, calls no external servers and sends no telemetry; it is eligible for Atlassian’s Runs on Atlassian program. Security covers this in full. It is free on Jira sites with up to 10 users; paid tiers are billed through the Marketplace and published with the listing.

What it is not. It is not Plans: no scheduling, capacity or dependency tracking. It does not export, expose an API or edit issues, and it cannot create hierarchy levels — it follows the ones your site has.

Setting it up on a Standard site

1. A Jira admin installs the app from the Marketplace listing, once for the site.
2. On a dashboard, choose Add gadget and add Hierarchy Totals.
3. On first view, approve the one-time Allow access request.
4. Open the gadget’s settings, tick your projects, pick the field and the aggregate, and save. The live preview appears at once; the complete numbers arrive when the first background pass finishes.

The getting started doc walks through each screen.

When you do need Premium

If the problem is scheduling — capacity per team, dependencies between epics, what-if scenarios, a timeline that moves when a story slips — that is Plans, and no gadget replaces it. If you want to create a level above epic rather than roll up one you already have, only Premium and Enterprise can configure it. For everything else in this guide — the total of a hierarchy, across projects, on a dashboard, kept up to date — Standard is enough. The companion guides cover every native way to sum story points and how a rollup should be computed.