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 Epic, Type, and Label dropdowns, there's a Quick filters control. This is the toggle bar your team will actually click day to day; everything else in this guide is about populating it with filters worth having.

From the board, open its settings — reachable from the board's menu — which takes you to a dedicated settings screen for that specific board, not the whole space. The left-hand panel here lists Details, Working Days, Timeline, and a Layout section that expands into Columns, Swimlanes, Card colors, Card layout, and Quick filters. Click Quick filters.

This settings page is scoped to one board at a time — in this case, a board called "TS board" inside the TEST SPACE. That scoping matters: quick filters you build here apply to this board specifically, not every board across the space, so if your team works from multiple boards you'll set this up separately on each one.

The Quick filters page lists any filters that already exist for the board — by default you'll typically see starter filters like "Recently Updated" and "Assigned to me" already in place. 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," not "Bugs Currently Assigned to Me"), a required JQL query that defines the actual filter logic, and an optional Description for context. The existing "Assigned to me" filter, for reference, is built on a query checking that the issue is assigned to the current user, and "Recently Updated" checks for items updated within the last day — both useful patterns to copy if you're unsure how to phrase your own.

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 — just keep in mind that more conditions make the filter's name and purpose harder to guess at a glance, so favor a few well-named filters over 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 actually narrows the way you expected — if it shows nothing or everything, the JQL syntax is the first place to check, since a small typo there is the most common reason a new filter doesn't behave.