How to see percent complete on a Jira epic

An epic with a dozen stories tells you almost nothing at a glance — it just says “In Progress” while the work underneath it moves. Jira knows every child’s state; it just never turns that into a percent complete. Here’s how to get one.

What Jira shows natively

Open an epic and Jira gives you its child issues, their statuses, and a basic progress bar in the Child issues panel — done vs. total direct children, by count. What it doesn’t give you:

• A percentage number. The bar is visual; nothing labels it “67% complete.”
• Rolled-up story points or estimates. Jira keeps points per issue and never totals a parent’s children, so the bar can’t be weighted by size — only a company-managed Scrum board’s Backlog panel can do that, and only in its sidebar.
• Sub-tasks in the count. Only direct children show up; sub-tasks under those stories are invisible to it.

So “how far along is this epic?” stays a rough glance at an unlabeled bar — or a manual tally of the child list.

How to compute it

• Pick a definition. By status (children done ÷ total) is the simplest and needs no estimates. By effort (story points or estimate done ÷ total) reflects that a 13-point story isn’t a 1-point one.
• Include the whole tree. Sub-tasks under stories count too, so a real figure rolls up epic → story → sub-task, not just the epic’s direct children.
• Put the number where it’s read. A percentage is only useful if it’s on the epic (and parent) issue, visible the moment someone opens it — see how to show sub-task progress on the parent issue.

Without a spreadsheet

Tally rolls children and sub-tasks up to the parent and epic, on the issue, with no formulas. Its free tier shows child status and a done/total count at a glance; its Standard tier rolls up story points, estimates and percent complete across the whole epic → story → sub-task tree. For the points side specifically, see how to roll up story points to an epic in Jira.

The takeaway

Jira shows an epic’s children but never a percentage, so progress is something you count by hand. Decide whether “complete” means status or effort, roll the whole tree up to the epic, and put the number on the issue — then epic progress becomes a figure you can read at a glance instead of infer.