Issue fields: Structured issue metadata is in public preview

[ebndev]

issue.fields.public.preview.mp4

If you've ever used labels like priority/p0, severity/high, or team/frontend to track structured data in issues, you know the pain: no types, no validation, no consistency across repositories, and no way to report on them. Issue fields fix all of that. Define typed, org-wide fields once and they show up on every issue, in every repository, automatically. Search by them, report on them, automate with them.

Issue fields are now in public preview. We're rolling out access gradually to select organizations. Not all organizations will have access immediately. If you'd like to be enabled sooner, request access in this discussion (see below).

We've been running a private preview since November 2025 and have been iterating based on feedback. Here's what teams are saying:

"This is fantastic. Probably my top GitHub pain point. I had even drafted a custom app in the past to manage these labels, which I'd be happy to ditch."
— LeaVerou

"We've completely abandoned Atlassian products and moved our whole planning/backlog/iteration work into GitHub, and not having the fields has been a large pain point."
— syntaqx, aspyn-io

"Scoped labels in GitHub!? Is this reality?! 🤯 Scoped labels are the core reason we remained on GitLab."
— alystair, pagedriver

📦 What you get out of the box

When issue fields are enabled for your organization, you get a ready-to-use setup.

Default fields

Every organization starts with four fields:

Field	Type	Values
Priority	Single-select	Urgent, High, Medium, Low
Effort	Single-select	High, Medium, Low
Start date	Date	-
Target date	Date	-

Pinned to the right issue types by default

Field	No type	Bug	Task	Feature
Priority	x	x	x	x
Effort		x	x	x
Start date				x
Target date				x

Create a bug and you'll see Priority and Effort right there in the sidebar. Create a feature and you get all four. No setup, no config, just works.

🔧 Make it your own

The defaults are a starting point. Organization admins can customize everything.

Add new fields

You can add up to 25 fields per organization. Four field types to choose from:

• Single-select - pick from a predefined list (e.g., Severity, Impact, Team)
• Text - free-form text with auto-detected URLs (e.g., DRI, Notes)
• Number - numeric values including decimals (e.g., Story points, Staffing)
• Date - date picker (e.g., Ship date, Review date)

Pin fields to issue types

Decide which fields show up for each type. Pin severity to bugs, impact to features, your custom types, or whatever combination works for your team. You can also pin fields to issues that don't have a type.

Customize options and colors

Rename fields, add descriptions, create and reorder options, pick colors. Changes apply across the entire org instantly.

Control visibility on public repos

Issue fields work on public repositories. Set each field to Public (visible to everyone) or Organization only (visible to org members and collaborators only). All fields default to Organization only, so nothing is exposed unless you choose. Learn more.

🔍 Search by field values

Some things you can do:

• Find all urgent issues past their target date
• Surface high-effort features that haven't been started
• Filter by DRI to see someone's workload

📊 Works with Projects

Add any issue field as a column in your project views, then group, filter, and slice by field values. Unlike project custom fields, issue fields travel with the issue across projects and views, so your data stays consistent everywhere.

Issue fields count toward the 50-field limit per project.

Note: Issue field visibility settings are not currently supported in Projects. Support is coming in a future update.

📝 Timeline tracking

Every field change shows up in the issue timeline with what changed, when, and who did it.

⚡ API and automation

Full REST API and GraphQL API support for both field settings (create, update, delete fields) and field values (get, set, clear values on issues). Automate field management, do bulk updates, filter by fields, and sync with external tools.

Webhook events (field_added, field_removed) let you trigger GitHub Actions on field changes:

on:
  issues:
    types:
      - field_added
      - field_removed

✨ What's new since private preview

Since the private preview, we've fixed over 50 bugs and shipped several improvements:

• Effort field - added as a fourth default alongside Priority, Start date, and Target date
• Public repository support - issue fields now work on public repos with visibility controls. Set each field to Public or Organization only. Details
• Compact layout - fields use 40-50% less space in the sidebar
• Pin fields to no-type issues - fields can show on issues without a type
• Diacritics support - field names support accents, umlauts, and other special characters

🔄 Migration tool

Already using labels or project fields for structured data? We built a Copilot skill to help you migrate. It bulk-copies values from labels or project fields into your new org-level issue fields.

🙋 How to request access

Want to try it? Post a comment in this discussion with your organization slug and a brief description of how you'd use it. We'll get back to you.

💬 Feedback

We'd love to hear from you! Share feedback, report issues, or suggest ideas in this discussion. Your input directly shapes what we build next.

To learn more, check out the issue fields documentation.

[kutsan]

We use issue-only repositories internally to track tasks and manage everything through GitHub Projects. A single repository can have issues for multiple platforms and teams. This feature would help us streamline our workflow, so I'd like to request it be enabled for the @wavera org.

[labudis]

Enabled for wavera! Check your org settings to get started. Let us know how it goes!

[alexanderniebuhr]

We use labels to track over 500 issues for our innovation lab, would be great to get access to the preview @frickegroup

[labudis]

Enabled for frickegroup! Head to your org settings to configure fields. Would love to hear how it goes!

[alexanderniebuhr]

@labudis quick initial feedback. So far it looks quite promising, however sometimes we do add pull requests to our projects board and give them a priority. In the past it worked with project priority field, but there doesn't seem any option to set the new global priority field on pull requests. do you have any idea or insight?

[labudis]

For now Issue fields are an Issues feature so you will not be able to apply Issue fields to PRs but we are monitoring requests for PR support so your feedback is noted!

[aaronsteers]

@labudis and @alexanderniebuhr

+1 for support for custom fields for pull requests. One idea to implement would be to align "pull request" as an "issue type" - so that fields could have an affinity to be leveraged in pull requests (or not) in the same way that fields might be applicable to bugs-type issues or not.

[MrLesk]

Would like to explore storing Backlog.md's tasks directly as Github issues. This new feature would drastically simplify the integration
https://github.com/MrLesk/Backlog.md

[labudis]

Thanks for the interest! Issue fields are an organization-level feature, so they need to be enabled on a GitHub organization (not a personal account). Do you have an organization where you'd like us to enable it?

[DerZade]

Currently at @arma-events we use fields in projects and issue type, but the integration of issues and projects always lacked a bit imo. Atm we move all isses to a single project to allow setting some metadata like size, status etc. Would love to try out the more issue-centered approach.

Also: Is there any chance of multi select coming as a field type? I always missed that in projects and the only reason why we still use good old labels for some things (for example affected components) 😕

[labudis]

Enabled for arma-events! Check your org settings to get started. On multi-select, it's on our radar but not available yet.

[setchy]

+1 for multi-select.

I'd like to migrate from custom labels to Issue Fields for Platform: [macOS, Windows, Linux]

[msune]

+1 for multi-select

[kutsan]

It would be really nice if these and other fields (like type, milestone etc.) could be marked as required at the time of issue creation.

[labudis]

Required fields are on our horizon! Can you share a bit more about your use case? Understanding which fields you'd want to enforce and in what scenarios would be really helpful.

[fnesveda]

This looks great! Can we get it for the apify organization? 🙏

[labudis]

Access has been enabled for apify. You should now see Priority, Effort, and date fields on your issues. Let us know how it goes!

[pedro-vbai]

We'd love to try these! Org is voicebrain. We're just setting up project management in github and want to use Projects as a flexible, light-weight, de-centralized way to track, manage, and visualize groups of related issues. But we need certain metadata to be consistent across new Projects, such as priority, estimates, resolution reason, etc. It'd be awesome to have org-level metadata fields like these to handle this, since some of these fields won't work well as labels (and would make our labels much too crowded). Thank you!

[labudis]

Access has been enabled for voicebrain. You should now see Priority, Effort, and date fields on your issues. Let us know how it goes!

[labudis]

Hi @pedro-vbai! Just a heads up, we also just shipped visibility settings so issue fields now work on public repositories too. Organization admins can choose which fields are visible publicly and which stay internal. Details here.

[h-m-f-t]

These look like great additions! We'd love to try them out @cisagov.

We have some fields (priority, effort) in Project metadata that really make more sense on the issue. Structured issue metadata is likely the nudge we'd need to start actually using Issue types.

[labudis]

Access has been enabled for cisagov. You should now see Priority, Effort, and date fields on your issues. Let us know how it goes!

[amenity]

🎉 Congrats, @labudis! You've done a fantastic job moving this forward and collecting such thorough feedback.
I assume that since @cityofaustin already has private preview access, we don't need anything switched on, but if not, please hook us up. 🙏🏻

Are y'all still thinking that you'll be opening these to public repos by next week? We're in a bit of a holding pattern since migrating from Zenhub and are very eager to get our product ops reporting up and running again.

[labudis]

Access has been enabled for cityofaustin. You should now see Priority, Effort, and date fields on your issues. Let us know how it goes!

[labudis]

Great news, @amenity! Issue fields now work on public repositories. Organization admins can control which fields are visible to everyone and which are restricted to organization members. Details in this comment. No more holding pattern!

[nicosammito]

We’d love to request access for the @code0-tech organization. We are currently in the process of building our community and want to ensure a structured workflow from the start. Moving away from label-based workarounds to typed, org-wide metadata like Priority and Effort would be a huge help in streamlining our issue management and reporting.

[nicosammito]

Amazing, thank you very much 🔥

[labudis]

Access has been enabled for code0-tech. You should now see Priority, Effort, and date fields on your issues. Let us know how it goes!

[chriswnek]

As the PM for the argc org, a consistent way to add priority and effort across our repos would be amazing.

[labudis]

Thanks for the interest! I wasn't able to find an organization matching argc. Note that issue fields is only available to GitHub Organizations, not personal accounts. Could you double-check the org slug and share it here? Happy to get you set up.

[chriswnek]

@labudis Sorry, had a typo in there, it's agrc

[chriswnek]

@labudis Just bumping up this request for agrc so it doesn't get lost. Thanks!

[labudis]

thanks, I added this to be enabled tomorrow!

[labudis]

Access enabled for agrc! Priority and effort fields are now live across your repos. Enjoy!

[noraa-junker]

I personally do not understand why these are bound to an organization and not per repo. In an organization with many different repos the need for different issue fields can be very big. Please make this bound to repos and not organizations!

[labudis]

Thanks for the feedback! We chose the org-level approach because one of the biggest pain points we heard was inconsistency: every repo ends up with slightly different definitions of "priority" or "effort," making cross-repo reporting and triage really difficult.

Could you share more about your use case? Specifically, what makes it difficult to have a single set of fields across your organization? That context would be really helpful as we think about how the feature evolves.

[noraa-junker]

It's not having a single set of fields across my organization that's difficult. It's more that certain repositories have specific needs. For example I am a contributor and close collaborator in the Microsoft PowerToys project. This is an app that consists of many different modules and it would be useful to have an issue field "Module" where we can specify the module. But as this feature is only available on organization level (Microsoft) such a field will (very likely) not be introduced as it is of zero use for other repos.

Maybe a hybrid approach where both is possible could be an option?

[kwin]

Same need for large organizations like apache, where each repo is run by a different team usually with different demands for issue fields

[kutsan]

Completely agree with @noraa-junker, we also need this for the same reason.

[setchy]

Would love to try this for gitify-app 🙏 🚀

[jamietanna]

Ah, we must have missed that in the original announcement - I didn't realise it would only work for private repos for now. Out of interest, why the split between public/private repo support?

[labudis]

Access has been enabled for gitify-app. You should now see Priority, Effort, and date fields on your issues. Let us know how it goes!

[labudis]

Hey @setchy! Issue fields now work on public repositories. Your organization admin can control which fields are visible publicly and which stay internal. Details here. You should be unblocked now!

[setchy]

Awesome, thanks @labudis.

Is there plans on the roadmap to support filtering repository Issue Lists using the Issue Fields? ie: show me all Priority: High issues

[labudis]

Yes, this is on our radar. In the meantime you can filter by typing "Priority" in your search bar and picking "High" from the dropdown.

[kewisch]

Please enable this for the https://github.com/thunderbird/ organization. We have a custom issue sync between Notion and GitHub going on, and are currently shoehorning Github Projects to set exactly the fields you describe: Start Date, Target Date, Priority and (soon) Estimate.

[labudis]

Issue fields are now enabled for thunderbird. Check your org settings under Organization > Planning > Issue Fields to get started.

Docs: Managing issue fields

[fostimus]

Isn't this supported already?

[labudis]

It's currently not possible to add Issue fields to public projects.

[fostimus]

Is there a limit for single-select types?

[labudis]

Hi @fostimus, did you click the "Save field" to lock in your changes? This form is not auto-saving.

[fostimus]

wow, big user error on my end! thanks for replying

[typed-sigterm]

Please enable for @paper-chemis. We're switching from Lark Bitable for project management if the feature is available.

[labudis]

Issue fields are now enabled for paper-chemis. Check your org settings under Organization > Planning > Issue Fields to get started.

Docs: Managing issue fields

[jrfnl]

Yet more noise which nobody needs. Same as the "Type" field nobody asked for.
Why force this on repos by default ? Make it an option, off by default and individual repos can then choose to turn it on.

The fact that only Organisation admins can customize this is totally useless. Setting some defaults at an org-level: fine. Not being able to further customize (or turn it off) at a repo-level: epic fail.
Plenty of repos live in organisations where only very few people have admin privileges at org-level. Even more so: the org admins may not even be known to the bulk of the repo admins. And without being able to customize at a repo-level, this is totally useless and just more visual noise I can do without.

[labudis]

Thanks for the candid feedback. A few things worth noting:

• Repo-level visibility control is something we're tracking as a request. We hear you on not wanting fields to appear everywhere, and feedback like this helps us prioritize.
• Org admin restriction is intentional for now to keep field definitions consistent across the org, but we understand the friction this causes in large orgs where repo maintainers and org admins are different people.

We appreciate you taking the time to share this.

[jrfnl]

@labudis Thanks for taking my comment seriously. It was absolutely intended to help you improve and prioritize 👍🏻

One of the biggest problems maintainers have is "noise", be it spam, AI slop or visual noise in the interface. Things like this (visual noise), means it takes me a few seconds longer find and fill in the right fields as used in a repo (labels, milestones). Now multiply those few seconds by thousands of issues/PRs, you can see why the noise is slowing maintainers like me down and with the increase in low-quality issues/PRs, anything that slows me down is a bad thing™.

[labudis]

In your particular case, if it was possible, would you configure repository specific issue fields that reflect your process/metadata needs and adopt the feature or simply turn off the feature and use the existing primitives (i.e. labels)?

[jrfnl]

@labudis I suspect for the vast majority of repos I maintain, I will turn it off and only maybe for the bigger/most active repos I might make use of it, but only if some sensible metadata can be defined for the project.

Keep in mind that 100% of my work is open source and not backed by a big company, so things like "start date", "end date", "cost", "story points" etc etc will never be useful for any of those projects.
"Priority" I can see some use for in the bigger projects, but only for issues, not for PRs.

[jrfnl]

Oh and that's another thing: most of these projects currently use labels extensively. Example: https://github.com/PHPCSStandards/PHP_CodeSniffer/labels

You can see in that list that the labels for that repo (and most repos in that org) are categorized in four groups: "Component", "Standard", "Status", "Type". Now, if I were to convert those groups to metadata fields, the net effect would be that instead of having to wait a second for the dropdown to populate for the one label drop down, I would now have to wait four times for the dropdowns to populate.
To me, that's just not an interesting proposition.

Aside from that, having the colour-coded labels show in the issue/PR list makes those lists pretty straight forward to visually scan for status/etc. From what I can currently see, I would not be able to achieve the same effect with metadata.

(I'd also have to completely rewrite certain workflows which auto-label PRs, but that should hopefully be reasonably doable.)

[phifuh]

After using the feature for a while now, there are three critical missing features, and all of them are related to how issue fields integrate with project boards:

1. When adding issue fields, the need for better filtering is more in demand than ever: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/16456
2. Project boards have, by default, the "Status" field, which is used for project board automation. For example, when adding or closing an issue, the status is updated. I would love the Status field to be a global field that can be used in project board automation. The current workaround of having something like "Status" and a global field called "Lifecycle" is unnecessary.
3. Different data types, like Iteration, should be at least on par with the current functionality in project boards.

I am not sure if the team working on this feature is even collaborating with the project boards team, but the above three issues would all work well with the feature and create significantly more value in synergy with the existing tools on GitHub.

[aytekinar-nordsnipe]

@labudis, do you think we can also use it at @nordsnipe? We are a start-up and the organization repositories are all private right now. We have a centralized planning repository, similar to a setup mentioned above, and we would like to categorize certain issues better across different repositories -- in fact, we stumbled upon this issue when searching for a "scoped label" support.

[labudis]

Issue fields are now enabled for nordsnipe. Check your org settings under Organization > Planning > Issue Fields to get started.

Docs: Managing issue fields

[stherold]

We would like to join the preview at @dbdrive 😃

[labudis]

Issue fields are now enabled for dbdrive. Check your org settings under Organization > Planning > Issue Fields to get started.

Docs: Managing issue fields

[thor]

Looks great! We'd love to try it out for our @Vatsim-Scandinavia organization, excited to use it for both priority and effort especially.

[labudis]

Issue fields are now enabled for vatsim-scandinavia. Check your org settings under Organization > Planning > Issue Fields to get started.

Docs: Managing issue fields

[norman-cc2]

This is very timely! I was just about to configure issues for CareChorus as we are starting to receive user feedback and I found this. Would be great if we can get it going using this right from the start.

[josearenad2412-alt]

Kj

[Mats-Jakobsson]

I would love to see this for the Energenius organization in Github.

[kewisch]

@labudis Thanks for getting us set up. Some initial feedback from seeing how we can adapt this in our org. As noted earlier we've been using Projects to define custom fields, along with some automation to make sure the right issues are landing in projects. Apologies if this has already been noted, it is becoming hard to comb through all the replies.

The Priority and Estimate fields work very well, they have a discrete number of options and it is nice to not have them hidden in the project and being able to set them for all issues. I assume the limit of options is 25 like in projects, there is a certain field I was imagining to create where this is limiting. However, I'm sure I can find a different path for that.

The Start/Target date fields need better integration with GitHub Projects. If it were possible to select these custom field dates in the timeline view as anchors for the timeline, we could easily show those dates instead of duplicating them between custom fields and projects.

Next up I'll check how to integrate this with our tools via API, will keep you posted.

[daniel-alder-apportus]

We'd love to try it out for https://github.com/apportus as well, especially the priority field.

[helter-seltzer]

We’d love to enable it for the trifibda org as we’re in the process of picking between Jira and GH Projects this week, so the timing is very good!