article 📣 Delay Until – Take control of your Automation workflows in Automation articles

📣 Delay Until – Take control of your Automation workflows

Simon Chan — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:12:52 GMT

In our previous post, we discussed how Atlassian is continuing to develop advanced capabilities in Atlassian Automation that can unlock powerful new ways to orchestrate your workflows. Now, we’re excited to introduce “Delay Until,” giving you even greater control over exactly when your automations run.

What is Delay Until?

Delay Until allows you to pause your automation workflow for a specific amount of time and/or until the right set of conditions is met. This means your workflows can pause for up to 10 days to wait for a task to be completed before progressing to the next step. Delay Until gives you the control to determine when the next tasks in your workflow happen exactly when you need them to.

What problem does it solve?

Automation workflows often need to pause and wait for the right moment—whether that’s a specific amount of time or until a key task is completed—but until now, customers had limited control over exactly when their automations should resume. This lack of flexibility can lead to bottlenecks, missed handoffs, or workflows that move ahead before teams are ready, ultimately reducing the reliability and impact of automation. With “Delay Until,” automation customers can finally orchestrate their workflows with precision, ensuring every step happens at just the right time for maximum efficiency and control.

How it works

When building or editing an automation rule, simply add the Delay Until component, which can be found under the 'PLUS: Add an advanced component’ section. You can then choose:

A time-only delay, or a time + event condition delay.
The duration of the delay: This can be set from 10 seconds up to 10 days.
The Event type: At launch, you can select either a Work Item or an Alert update.
The Event Conditions: Add up to 3 condition values.

Delay Until types

Delay Until Type	What it does
Time-only	When your automation runs, Delay Until suspends the workflow for the specified time period. It is resumed once the time period ends.
Time + Event Conditions	When your automation runs, Delay Until suspends the workflow for the specified time period or until all configured conditions are met, whichever occurs first.

How can you use Delay Until today?

Product Development Management with Rovo

Use a time-only Delay Until after your Rovo Action to ensure the Product Requirements Expert agent has completed writing draft requirements before your workflow continues.

Help desk request

When a user has created a new request but has yet to add details, delay your Help Desk workflow until they provide more details. By using Time + Event Conditions, the workflow will wait for up to 5 days for the user to respond, but if the user adds detail to their request sooner, the workflow with resume straightaway.

IT Ops

Pause your incident workflow until automated remediation steps have been taken and reviewed by your on-call team. Using Time + Event Conditions in this workflow will ensure that the automated remediation steps are completed before proceeding to the next steps, reducing your time to incident resolution.

Try it now - we’d love your feedback

Delay Until has started rolling out this week and will be available to Premium and Enterprise Edition customers by early October 2025. We can’t wait to see how you use Delay Until to supercharge your workflows. If you have any thoughts, questions, or want to share your use cases, leave a comment below.

FAQ

Q: How long can Delay Until pause a workflow?
A: Each individual Delay Until component can pause a workflow for a minimum of 10 seconds up to 10 days (240 hours). The time period is calculated from the moment the Delay Until component is processed.

Q: How many Delay Until components can be used in the same workflow?
A: You can use as many Delay Until components as you need. However, when designing your workflow, it’s recommended to keep the rule component, rule duration, and daily processing service limits in mind.

Q: What is the maximum rule duration when using Delay Until?
A: The total duration of a rule that uses an Advanced component, like Delay Until, cannot exceed 15 days from start to end (the delay time period does not count towards processing time - see below). Example: You cannot use two 8-day time-only delays in the same rule, as this would result in a total duration of 16+days. In most cases, you can use two 7-day time-only delays in the same rule, as this would result in a total duration between 14 and 15 days.

Q: How does Delay Until impact the Daily Processing Limit?
A: The time your workflow is paused does not count towards the Daily Processing Limit. However, processing the delay component itself does count, the same way processing other components like Actions does already.

Q: Will service limits for Delay Until and total rule duration be increased in the future?
A: Yes, we are planning to increase these in future releases - please keep an eye on the Cloud Roadmap. We are always keen to better understand what use cases longer delays/rules you are looking to solve, so please drop a comment below.

Q: Will more Event types and Condition options be available in the future?

A: Yes, we are planning to support more event types and condition options in future releases. Today, Delay Until supports Work Item or an Alert update event types + 3 Conditions with AND logic.

Great new updates! Always excited to see more automation...

Brandon Davies — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:20:15 GMT

Great new updates! Always excited to see more automation tools native to the Atlassian ecosystem.

Awesome! No longer, we'll have to 'hope for the best' wit...

Hans Polder _Devoteam_ — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 06:46:40 GMT

Awesome! No longer, we'll have to 'hope for the best' with some sequential running automation rules. :))

Is this available for Data Center? Or only Cloud?

Jerel Crosland — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:29:12 GMT

Is this available for Data Center? Or only Cloud?

Great feature. For future improvements, would love to see...

Everinas Kazla — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 10:15:16 GMT

Great feature. For future improvements, would love to see custom fields be available in delay conditions.

The "Apply event to" field confuses me, particularly sinc...

Mykenna Cepek — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 21:21:55 GMT

(wrong account, see below)

The "Apply event to" field confuses me, particularly sinc...

Mykenna Cepek — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:45:07 GMT

The "Apply event to" field confuses me, particularly since it is required and has only one offered value: "Trigger for this rule", or you can type in something. Neither of those options appear to be documented. This rule definitely needs a hyperlink to some documentation!

Note that the rule trigger is always at the very top of the rule. I don't understand how this "Delay until" component, which must appear later in the rule, has anything to do at that point in the execution with the rule trigger.

In other words: What does "Apply event to ... Trigger for this rule" even mean?

It seems like the event is part of the condition for this "Delay until" component to become satisfied and resume rule execution. The event has nothing to do with the rule trigger (the "trigger for this rule"), right?

I have exactly the same question as - what does "Apply e...

Stefan Draber — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 12:46:11 GMT

I have exactly the same question as @Mykenna Cepek - what does "Apply event to" mean in this context?

I see that I can create new values for this field by myself, besides the existing "Trigger for this rule", but since I don't get the meaning of this field, I have no idea what to enter here.

Currently I cannot see "Delay until" although we are a Pr...

ElkeFenger — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 10:02:07 GMT

Currently I cannot see "Delay until" although we are a Premium customer. Can you tell me how I can get "Delay until" in Automation Rules?

Seems to be good extra for automation. It will helps ever...

Urmo — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 06:52:47 GMT

Seems to be good extra for automation. It will helps everyday use.

- It's here now:

Mykenna Cepek — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:56:41 GMT

@Urmo - It's here now:

Echoing other comments - why is there no explanation or g...

Robert Hook — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:55:53 GMT

Echoing other comments - why is there no explanation or guidance for the "Apply event to" field? Is the only option we can use there "Trigger for this rule", or can we use smart values or something else? This is pretty incomplete instruction.

Hi Thanks for this nice feature and developing it furth...

Jared Schmitt — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 06:39:41 GMT

Hi @Simon Chan

Thanks for this nice feature and developing it further.

I see the 10 days limit was extended to 90 days - great! Is there any chance to also offer "business days" as a unit?