Automation pricing, effective December 3, 2026

Jira Automation Is Metered From December 3, 2026

Every trigger, condition, action, branch and loop your automation rules execute becomes a billable step — even the runs that match nothing. Here's exactly what Atlassian's own documentation says counts, and what to audit before the meter turns on.

What Counts as a Step

Atlassian's own automation usage documentation defines it plainly: “An automation step is a single executed part of an automation flow, including triggers, conditions, actions, branches, and loops.” Each one below counts as one step when it executes:

Trigger

The event that starts a rule — counts as a step every time it fires

Condition

Every condition checked, whether it passes or fails

Action

Every action executed — comment, transition, field update, webhook, etc.

Branch

Each branch a rule executes, including branches over linked or related items

Loop

Each iteration of a loop — a loop over 500 items is up to 500 steps, not one

It Bills Whether the Rule Does Anything or Not

Atlassian's documentation lists the run outcomes that consume allowance — and it's all of them. A scheduled rule that fires every night and matches nothing still burns steps, every night, forever:

Run outcome	Billed?
SUCCESS	Yes
NO_ACTIONS_PERFORMED	Yes
SOME_ERRORS	Yes
ABORTED	Yes
NO_MATCH — the rule ran and matched nothing	Yes

Extra Usage Is On by Default

Atlassian's usage-based pricing page states that extra usage is “enabled by default and billed in arrears,” with alerts at 80% and 100% of allowance, and that when a limit is reached “only the specific meter that has been exhausted” pauses. That inverts the protection most admins expect: the customer who does nothing gets a variable invoice, and the customer who deliberately opts out of overage billing is the one who gets automation that stops running mid-month. Deciding which side of that you want to be on is worth doing before December 3, not after the first metered invoice.

TechRepublic reported on 3 September 2026 that overage is priced at $0.50 per 1,000 steps. That figure does not appear on any Atlassian page as of this writing — Atlassian's own documentation says only “Billed per step executed,” with no rate attached. Treat $0.50 as reported, not confirmed, until Atlassian publishes its own number.

The Published Monthly Allowances

Per-user-per-month, and pooled across your whole organization — Atlassian's billing documentation states the org-wide allowance for a meter is the sum of every subscription's allowance for that meter. Unused allowance does not roll over to the next month.

Plan	Automation steps allowance
Jira Free	150 per subscription
Jira Standard	400 per user
Jira Premium	750 per user
Jira Enterprise	1,000 per user
Confluence Free	50 per subscription
Confluence Standard	100 per user
Confluence Premium	250 per user
Confluence Enterprise	500 per user

Automation steps are one of seven meters Atlassian has now published allowances for — the others are Rovo credits, Assets objects, four separate Bitbucket meters, and AI agent resolution for Customer Service Management. Atlassian publishes a unit price for Rovo credits ($10 per 1,000) but not yet for the rest. See how your own headcount and plan size against these allowances →

What to Audit Before December 3

Scheduled rules that sweep large JQL results

A rule that runs against a 300-item filter today and a 4,000-item filter next year gets more expensive with no change to the rule itself — the automation didn't change, the data it touches did.

Branches over linked or related work items

Branching logic multiplies steps in proportion to how many items it touches. A branch over a story's ten linked tasks is roughly ten times the steps of the same rule with no branch.

Rules nobody has opened in years

A scheduled rule left running since 2022 that matches nothing every night has been silently free. On December 3 it starts consuming — and eventually costing — allowance for doing precisely nothing.

Your extra-usage setting

Decide deliberately whether you want automation to keep running past your allowance (variable invoice) or pause (automation stops mid-month) — the default is billing, not pausing.

Automation You Host and Meter Yourself

See what your actual footprint costs against a platform where automation isn't a metered add-on.

Size My Instance

Sources

Compiled September 2026 from Atlassian's own announcement and support documentation, current as of that reading. The $0.50-per-1,000-steps figure is TechRepublic's, not Atlassian's — re-verify all figures directly at support.atlassian.com before making decisions based on this page, and again after December 3, 2026.