Jira license costs tend to grow faster than actual usage. Users get added during onboarding, rarely removed during offboarding, and the gap between licensed users and active users widens quietly over time. This checklist gives Jira Cloud admins a repeatable process for auditing and optimizing license spend.
Work through it once to clean up your current state, then revisit monthly or quarterly to keep things tight.
1. Export Your User List
Go to admin.atlassian.com > Directory > Users. Export the full user list including last active date. This is your baseline. Sort by last active date ascending -- the users at the top of the list (oldest last-active dates) are your first candidates for cleanup.
Note how many total users have Jira product access. Compare this number against your current billing tier.
2. Identify Inactive Users
Define your inactivity threshold. Common choices:
- 30 days: Aggressive. Best for contractor-heavy environments where access should be tightly controlled.
- 60 days: Balanced. Catches most genuinely inactive users while giving infrequent users a buffer.
- 90 days: Conservative. Safe default for most organizations. Accounts for quarterly workflows and leave periods.
Flag every user whose last active date exceeds your threshold. This is your cleanup list.
3. Check for Tier Threshold Opportunities
Atlassian uses tiered pricing: 1-10, 11-25, 26-50, 51-100, 101-250, and so on. Each tier has a different per-user rate, and crossing down into a lower tier can meaningfully reduce your per-user cost.
Check: if you remove the inactive users from step 2, do you drop into a lower pricing tier? If your current count is 108 and you have 15 inactive users, removing them puts you at 93 -- dropping from the 101-250 tier to the 51-100 tier. That is a significant per-user cost reduction on top of the direct savings.
4. Separate Jira and Confluence
Jira and Confluence are billed separately. A user active in Jira but inactive in Confluence is still consuming a Confluence license if they are in the confluence-users group. Check both products independently.
For each product, identify users who have access but have not used that specific product within your threshold. Removing Confluence access for Jira-only users (and vice versa) is one of the easiest wins.
5. Audit Group Memberships
Product access in Atlassian Cloud is controlled by group membership. Check which groups grant Jira access (typically jira-software-users or similar). Look for:
- Default groups: Are new users automatically added to groups that grant product access? If so, people who do not need Jira might be getting licensed by default.
- Stale groups: Are there project-specific groups with users who no longer work on that project?
- Overly broad groups: Is there an "all-staff" group that grants Jira access to everyone, including departments that do not use it?
6. Handle Unmanaged Accounts
Unmanaged accounts (users with email addresses outside your verified domain) do not appear in your organization directory and are invisible to SCIM. They still consume licenses. Check your site-level user list for accounts with personal email domains (gmail.com, outlook.com, etc.) and external contractor domains.
For each unmanaged account, decide: is this person still actively collaborating? If not, remove their product access.
7. Review Service and Bot Accounts
Automation tools, CI/CD integrations, and service accounts sometimes consume Jira licenses. Check if any of these can be converted to app-level authentication (which does not consume a user license) or if they are using accounts that could be removed.
8. Notify Before Removing Access
Before deactivating users or removing product access, send a notification. A simple email saying "Your Jira access will be removed in 7 days due to inactivity -- log in to keep your access" reduces false positives and help desk tickets. Most genuinely inactive users will not respond, confirming they are safe to remove.
9. Remove Access Safely
For most cases, remove users from the product access group rather than deactivating their Atlassian account entirely. This:
- Frees the license seat immediately
- Preserves the user's account, issue history, and comments
- Makes reactivation easy (just re-add them to the group)
- Does not affect their access to other Atlassian products
Only fully deactivate accounts for users who have left the organization entirely.
10. Automate Ongoing Maintenance
A one-time audit gets you clean. Staying clean requires a repeatable process. Options range from a calendar reminder for a monthly manual check to fully automated tools that monitor activity and remove access on a daily schedule.
If you are managing more than 50 users, automation typically pays for itself within the first month by catching inactive accounts faster than any manual cadence. User Management Automation for Jira and Confluence is one option on the Atlassian Marketplace that handles this (full disclosure: I work on this app). There are other tools available as well -- the key is to have something running continuously rather than relying on periodic manual reviews.
Quick Reference Checklist
- Export user list with last active dates
- Flag users inactive beyond your threshold (30/60/90 days)
- Check if cleanup drops you into a lower pricing tier
- Audit Jira and Confluence separately
- Review group memberships for default and stale access
- Find and clean up unmanaged accounts
- Review service and bot accounts
- Send notification before removing access
- Remove from product groups (not full deactivation)
- Set up automation or a recurring calendar reminder
Run through this checklist once and note the savings. Most admins find 10-25% of their licensed users are immediately removable -- and the number keeps growing between cleanup cycles if you do not automate.