How to Add Quick Filters to a Sprint or Kanban Board in Jira

Open any board; a Kanban board like "Marketing" works the same way a Scrum board does here. Along the toolbar above the columns, next to the Epic, Type, and Label dropdowns, there's a Quick filters control.

This is the toggle bar your team will click day to day. Everything else in this guide is about populating it with filters worth having.

From the board, open the ••• menu and choose Configure board (some Jira sites label this Board settings in the newer navigation; either takes you to the same screen). This settings page is scoped to one board at a time, in this case a board called "TS board" inside the TEST SPACE, so quick filters you build here only apply to this board.

Atlassian's own documentation lists Quick Filters as its own tab in the left-hand panel alongside Columns, Swimlanes, Card colors, and Card layout, not tucked inside a combined Layout section as older write-ups describe. Click Quick Filters to open it.

The Quick filters page lists any filters that already exist for the board. New boards ship with two by default: Atlassian's documentation names them "Only My Work items" and "Recently Updated," though older boards or different templates may show similarly named starter filters. Click Create quick filter in the top right to open the creation form and add your own.

The Create quick filter form asks for three things: a required Name (what shows on the toggle itself, so keep it short, "My Bugs" rather than "Bugs Currently Assigned to Me"), a required JQL query that defines the filter logic, and an optional Description for context. The board's default filters are useful patterns to copy if you're unsure how to phrase your own: "Only My Work items" checks that the issue is assigned to the current user, and "Recently Updated" checks for items updated within the last day.

For a priority filter, something like priority = High narrows the board to urgent items. For an issue-type filter, type = Bug isolates defects from stories and tasks.

You can combine conditions with AND if a single toggle needs to represent more than one rule, though more conditions make the filter's name and purpose harder to guess at a glance. A few well-named filters generally work better than one that tries to do everything.

Click Create to save the filter, then go back to the board and find it in the Quick filters toolbar. Click it and confirm the board narrows the way you expected.