Jira Guest Access: 5 Free Guests per Paid User

In October 2017 someone asked on the Atlassian Community about guest access to Jira. That thread had 30,175 views when we checked it on 12 November 2026. Its accepted answer sets up a "guests" group that still uses a normal licence, and a later comment sums it up: "You're still burning user licenses and paying the JIRA fees". That was right at the time. On 27 April 2026 Atlassian announced free guest access for Jira Cloud. Its guest doc now says "Guests are free of charge (up to 5 guests per paid user)" on the Standard, Premium and Enterprise plans. I'm glad it's here.

So the next contractor, client or vendor who only works in one Jira space doesn't need a paid seat. On our test site, adding an outside address to a space as a guest showed "0 new licenses have been added to Jira", and the licensed user count didn't move. The people you already pay for can't be switched, though: Atlassian's policy says "You may not convert current or former paid users to guests". That includes removing a paid contractor and inviting them back as a guest, since they'd be a former paid user.

If 40 of the 200 seats a company would otherwise buy are for new outside people, guest access saves USD 3,936 a year on monthly Standard billing at today's list prices. On annual billing the saving only appears if guests keep you below the bottom of a price tier, for example at 400 users instead of 500.

We tested the admin side on our own Jira Cloud test site, which is on Premium, on 12 November 2026. We couldn't log in as the guest, so what a guest sees comes from Atlassian's documentation. A note on words: Atlassian now calls a Jira project a space, and an issue a work item.

[[steps]]

1. Invite the guest to your site as a site admin, with the Guest role.
2. Add the guest to one space with the Guest - Collaborator role.
3. Give the guest role Browse spaces if the space is company-managed.
4. Check the licence counts in Atlassian Administration.
5. Remove the guest from the space and from Jira when the work ends.

Do Jira guest users need a license? Who can be a guest, and who still needs a paid seat

Atlassian's doc defines a guest as "anyone outside your organization, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or related entities", like clients, vendors, freelancers or external consultants. Their email domain can't match any domain your organisation owns, so a contractor you gave a company email address can't be a guest.

The rule people trip over is the space one. I'd check it first. Someone who works in two spaces on the same site can't be a guest there and needs a paid seat, although the same person can be a guest on several different sites with one space on each of them.

We saw what that looks like. When we tried to add our guest to a second space, the people picker showed them greyed out with the label "Not in this space", and we couldn't select them. There was no error message and no tooltip. So plan the space before you invite.

Before you start

Note

Prerequisites

• Jira Cloud on the Standard, Premium or Enterprise plan. Our test site is on Premium.
• A site admin for the invite and for the permission scheme in Step 3, and a space admin to add the guest to a space.
• The guest's email address, on a domain your organisation doesn't own, for someone who has never been a paid user.
• Atlassian's weekly change log still listed "Guest role available for Jira" as rolling out in its 21-28 September 2026 post, the newest one we could find. If you don't see a Guest role, your site may not have it yet.

Guests are external users, so your organisation's external user security settings apply to them. Atlassian's Manage guest access doc names some of them, like two-step verification, periodic re-verification and API token access.

When you're done you'll have an outside collaborator working in one space, counted as a guest and not as a licensed user.

Step 1: Invite a guest user to Jira from User management

This is Atlassian's procedure from Manage guest access in Jira. You need to be a site admin.

1. In Jira's top navigation, select Settings, then User management. The Users page opens.
2. Select Invite users. The invite form opens.
3. In the email field, enter the guest's email address.
4. In the Apps tab, find your Jira site, and in the Roles dropdown select Guest.
5. Select Next, check the summary, and select Grant access.

The doc says that once the person accepts and signs in with an Atlassian account, "they'll appear as a guest on your site". It adds that "they still can't see any work until a space admin adds them to a specific space". As site admins we skipped this step, because adding a new address in Step 2 sent the invite for us. If the person adding guests to your space isn't a site admin, ask a site admin to do Step 1 first. Atlassian documents that order, and we only tried the shortcut as site admins.

Step 2: Add the guest to one space with the Guest - Collaborator role

We ran this step. The space admin does it from the space's own settings.

1. In your space, open Space settings and select Access (Atlassian's doc calls this page People). You see the people with a role in this space.
2. Select Add people. A dialog opens with Names or emails and Role.
3. In Names or emails, type the guest's full email address and pick the line that shows exactly that address. The address appears as a chip with an envelope icon.
4. Open Role and select Guest - Collaborator. Its description ends with "(non-billable)".
5. Select Add 1 person. A confirmation dialog opens.

You should see this:

Added people to space
You have added 1 person to your space and 0 new licenses have been added to Jira.
New to Jira

We typed a brand new address here without doing Step 1 first, and Jira sent the invite itself. It was a test address on a mail domain our test organisation doesn't manage, and Atlassian Administration labelled the account External user. The email's subject was "Action requested: Admin invited you to join your team in Jira", with an Accept invite button. Behind the scenes Jira put our guest in a group called jira-guests-wolfaenpak (wolfaenpak is our test site), with the role Guest.

Look twice. Check the address before you select Add. When we typed only part of a name, the list offered an address built from that name and our admin's email domain, and we invited an address that doesn't exist.

Step 3: Give the guest role Browse spaces in a company-managed space

Our test space is team-managed (configured from inside the space), so we skipped this. Atlassian's doc asks for it only in company-managed spaces, the ones a Jira admin configures with shared schemes. There, the guest "won't be able to access the space" unless the permission scheme gives the guest role Browse spaces. These are the doc's steps.

1. In Jira, go to Settings, then Work items, then Permission schemes.
2. Select the permission scheme your guest's space uses.
3. Find Browse spaces and select Update.
4. Select Space role, then Guest - Collaborator.
5. Select Save.
6. Optional: repeat for each other permission your guests need, like Create work items or Add comments.

Step 4: Check the guest isn't counted as a licensed user

Finance will want proof that no seat was used.

1. In admin.atlassian.com, open Apps, then Atlassian apps, then Jira for your site. The page shows Total users, Licensed users and your Plan.
2. Compare the two counts. Guests are in Total users and not in Licensed users.
3. Optional: open the guest from Directory > Users. Their Jira row shows the role Guest, and Last seen reads "Not tracked for this role".

You should see Total users go up by one for each guest while Licensed users stays the same. On our site, three guest adds took Total users from 12 to 15, and Licensed users stayed at 8. Two of those adds were our own mistakes (two wrong picks from the suggestion list), which is why there were three. Finance can check it the same way.

We didn't see the 5:1 ratio, or how many guests you have left, on this page or on Billing and subscriptions. If you're anywhere near it (a 10-user site can have up to 50 guests), keep your own count. A spreadsheet is enough.

Step 5: Remove a guest when the engagement ends

When we removed our guest from the space, the flag said "guest.tutorial no longer has access to this space", and the account was still a Jira guest on the site. Atlassian's doc says the same: they "can't access Jira at all, but will remain in the guest list". So there are two removals.

1. In the space, open Space settings > Access, select Remove on the guest's row, and confirm. The guest loses the space.
2. In admin.atlassian.com, open Directory > Users and select the guest. Their user page opens.
3. In the row for Jira, select More actions (•••), then Remove access. The doc says this "completely revokes the guest's access to Jira on your site".
4. Optional: to remove the person from your organisation, select More actions for user > Remove user. The dialog says "They'll lose access to all apps, but most content they created won't be deleted."

You should see no apps on the guest's user page. We did item 3 a different way, by removing the account from the jira-guests-wolfaenpak group through Jira's REST API, and the user page then read "No apps added".

To check from the API that no guests are left on the site, list the guest group's members. Use your own site name, admin email and API token:

curl -s -u "[email protected]:$API_TOKEN" "https://<your-site>.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/group/member?groupname=jira-guests-<your-site>"

You should see "total":0 once every guest is removed. Ours printed this after our cleanup (we trimmed the self URL):

{"maxResults":50,"startAt":0,"total":0,"isLast":true,"values":[]}

What a Jira guest can and can't see

When we tried to log in as our guest, Atlassian's sign-up page asked us to tick "I'm not a robot", which we couldn't complete in our automated test. So this section comes from Atlassian's guest permissions doc and the invite doc. We'd have liked to see it ourselves.

A guest can browse their one space. They can create and edit work items there, and move them through the workflow. They can be assigned work and assign it to others. They can comment, add attachments, log work and link work items inside the same space. Boards and backlogs work too, "as allowed by the guest role and space configuration".

A guest can't open any other space, administer the space, manage sprints, archive work items or move them to another space, or act as a service agent. They get no global permissions, so they can't share dashboards or filters or make bulk changes. Atlassian's announcement adds that guests "can't see your Goals, team directory, or other spaces".

We found no Atlassian page that says whether a Jira guest can use Rovo (Atlassian's AI), or how a guest behaves inside automation rules. For Confluence guests, Atlassian's ROVO-38 says Rovo isn't available "because Confluence guest users are not billable for Rovo". I'd probably assume the same for Jira until Atlassian says otherwise.

Converting a licensed Jira user to a guest: not allowed, and the space role doesn't do it

The request to allow it, JRACLOUD-98504, was at 35 votes and Gathering Interest on 12 November 2026. Going the other way is fine. You can promote a guest to a licensed role, and from then on they count toward your bill.

We wanted to see what happens if you try anyway. In a space's Add people dialog we gave our paid test user the Guest - Collaborator role. Jira accepted it. The toast said "Invite sent", with no warning. She kept her paid licence. She also stayed in the Jira users group, so on a paying user Guest - Collaborator is just a space role. The Jira row's menu on her user page had no item to change her role to Guest. We couldn't open our site's row in the admin role list, so we don't know whether Guest is offered there.

Jira did let us add, as a guest, a person who pays for Jira on another site in our organisation. Jira not blocking it doesn't make it allowed. Atlassian defines a guest as "anyone outside your organization", so don't use the Guest role for your own people.

For seats you already pay for, the lever is people who've left: finding and removing inactive users frees those.

Jira guest access cost: the seat saving at 50, 200 and 500 users

Prices are Atlassian's Jira list prices in US dollars as we read them on 12 November 2026, after the 13 October increase. Monthly billing is graduated: on Standard you pay USD 9.70 per user for users 1-100, USD 8.20 for 101-250 and USD 6.85 for 251-1,000 (Premium USD 19.60, 14.65 and 10.20). Annual is different. You pay one flat price for each user tier, like 101-200 or 401-500.

My assumptions: 20% of the seats you'd otherwise buy are for new outside people with their own email domains, each works in one space, and none of them was ever a paid user. List prices, Jira only, no discounts.

Why is the annual saving zero at 50 and 200? It's the tiers. 200 users and 160 users both sit in the 101-200 tier, at USD 18,000 a year on Standard. At 500 users, staying at 400 puts you in the 301-400 tier (USD 32,500) instead of 401-500 (USD 39,000). If guests take you below your current tier, Atlassian's cloud pricing FAQ says you get the lower tier by contacting them "when your renewal is due". The monthly saving per guest also gets smaller as you grow: above 250 users each seat you don't buy on Standard is USD 6.85 a month.

The 5:1 cap didn't matter in any of these rows, since 160 paid users could have 800 guests, while the one-space rule matters a lot more, so count how many of your outside people work in two spaces before you give finance a number.

On 3 December 2026 Atlassian starts billing usage meters like Rovo credits and automation steps. Each user adds an allowance to a shared pool for each meter. No Atlassian page we found says whether guests count as users for that. For per-seat prices at larger sizes, see our Jira Premium vs Enterprise pricing breakdown.

Where guest access stops: service spaces, Confluence and apps

Jira Service Management. A guest can't be a service agent, and your customers (the people who raise requests on the portal) were already free, so they don't need the Guest role either.

Confluence. Confluence has its own guests with the same 5-per-paid-user ratio, but some rules differ. Guests there can open any space that allows anonymous access, and Marketplace apps are on for them by default, according to Atlassian's page on what Confluence guests can see and do. Its Confluence guest invite doc adds that guests "are not currently supported in Confluence mobile apps".

Apps in Jira. Atlassian's Forge developer doc, updated 28 October 2026, says "By default, Forge modules don't allow unlicensed user access", and only four Jira module types can let guests in. So if your team uses a Marketplace app inside the space, ask its vendor whether guests can use it. Check before the guest's first day.

If it didn't work

The guest is greyed out with "Not in this space". They're already a guest in another space on your site. Atlassian's doc says you'll "need to remove them before adding them to another space" (Step 5, item 1).

The guest accepted the invite and sees nothing. In a company-managed space the permission scheme needs Browse spaces for Guest - Collaborator (Step 3).

You invited the wrong address. Remove that account from the space and from Jira (Step 5), and type the full address next time.

There's no Guest role in the dialog. Check the plan first, since Free has no guest access, then the rollout note under Before you start.

What you have now, and what I'd do

[[takeaways]]

• What you set up. An outside collaborator in one space, counted in Total users and not in Licensed users, and a clean way to take them out when the work ends.
• What to check on yours. The Jira page in Atlassian Administration before and after the add: Licensed users shouldn't move.
• What this doesn't cover. The guest's own view (we couldn't log in), Rovo and automation for guests, and the company-managed permission step, which we took from Atlassian's doc.

I think the saving is mostly in new engagements. If you're on monthly billing, I'd make Guest - Collaborator the default for each new contractor, client or vendor who works in a single space, starting with the next contract you sign. If you're on annual billing, check before your renewal whether guests keep you below a tier boundary, because that's when it changes the bill.

If you try this and your guest sees something different from what Atlassian's doc describes, I'd love to hear about it on the Community :)

Originally published on leanzero.net. More Atlassian, Forge and local-AI write-ups at leanzero.net/blog, and if you're planning a migration or a Forge app, that's what we do: leanzero.net/services.