Fixed, as of five days before this was checked. Atlassian’s Unified Timeline rollout to Jira Software spaces broke Epic grouping under an active filter — hierarchy fell back to a flyout modal instead of staying inline in the table — and the bug tracker entry for it, JRACLOUD-98720, was closed “Fixed” on 2026-09-18, with Atlassian’s own comment reading “Hierarchy layout when filter is active has now been released.” If you’re still landing here because your site looks broken, two real limits remain in the fix itself: it hides subtasks while it’s on, and it turns itself back off — reverting to flat rows plus the flyout — the instant your hierarchy has a level above Epic.
What actually broke, and when
Atlassian announced a unified, more powerful Timeline for Jira Software spaces (Community thread: Upcoming: Unified, More Powerful Timeline for Jira Software Spaces). Within the rollout window, JRACLOUD-98720 was filed on 2026-07-01, titled “Software Timeline: Hierarchy and epic grouping behaviour regression when filter is active.” Its own bug description states the problem plainly: “After the unified Software Timeline rollout to Jira Software spaces, hierarchy and epic grouping behaviour has changed unexpectedly when a filter is active. The hierarchy now displays in a flyout modal instead of inline in the table.” The listed workaround at filing time: “There is no workaround to display hierarchy when filter is active. Remove the active filter to restore inline hierarchy.”
The ticket wasn’t an isolated complaint. “Timeline View Reversion” drew 1,209 views, and “Timeline not grouping child items to Epics” drew 687 — its last comment: “we do not have a capability to view epics with stories under them anymore. Anyone found a solve?” A third, independent report, “Timeline view changed — Epics and Tasks now showing at the same level instead of grouped hierarchy”, hit the same wall from a different angle. Through most of the summer, “opt out of the new Timeline” or “wait for Atlassian” were the only replies anyone had.
The fix: “Show inline hierarchy,” shipped 2026-09-18
Atlassian’s answer is a toggle, previewed in the Community post “Coming Soon: Control how hierarchy is displayed when filtering in Jira Software Timeline” and rolled out in stages through August. Atlassian staff member Amy Cheong posted the mechanics directly on the JRACLOUD-98720 ticket on 2026-08-27:
“We have now rolling out the inline hierarchy feature which allow you to see your work items in two levels hierarchy when filter is active.”
On 2026-09-18, the same staff member closed the loop on the ticket: “Hierarchy layout when filter is active has now been released.” The ticket’s status flipped to Closed, resolution Fixed, the same day — confirmed directly against Atlassian’s own issue-tracker API, not a cached snippet or a forum paraphrase.
What’s still not fixed
Two real limits ship with the fix itself, stated by Atlassian on the same comment:
- Subtasks disappear in inline mode. “If Show inline hierarchy is turned ON, subtasks will not appear in your filtered results. They are hidden until you toggle the setting OFF to see them in flyout mode.” You can have filtered results with Epic-level hierarchy restored, or you can have subtasks visible — inline mode doesn’t do both at once.
- Anything above Epic still reverts to the old broken behavior. “Show inline hierarchy will set to turn OFF automatically if you start hierarchy level to above Level 1 (higher-level work type than Epic/Workstream). Filtered results will always show as a flat layout with flyout hierarchy mode in this configuration.” A Premium-configured Initiative level sitting above Epic gets none of the fix — see a hierarchy level above Epic in Jira for what that level can and can’t do outside the Timeline entirely.
And two newer, separate reports on the same ticket are worth naming rather than glossing over because they complicate a clean “fixed” headline: a 2026-09-10 comment describes an edited hierarchy item vanishing from the Timeline until a manual refresh, and a 2026-09-16 comment reports that drag-and-drop epic rank reordering doesn’t work on the Timeline at all. Neither is the grouping-under-filter regression this page tracks, and as of this writing neither has its own confirmed fix on the ticket.
The honest summary
| Symptom | Status as of 2026-09-23 |
|---|---|
| Hierarchy replaced by flyout modal when a filter is active (Epic ↔ Story/Task) | Fixed 2026-09-18 (JRACLOUD-98720, closed) |
| Subtasks visible together with inline hierarchy under a filter | Not fixed — mutually exclusive by design |
| Hierarchy level above Epic (e.g. Initiative) staying inline under a filter | Not fixed — auto-reverts to flat + flyout |
| Edited item disappearing from Timeline until refresh | Reported 2026-09-10, unresolved on the ticket |
| Drag-and-drop epic rank reordering on the Timeline | Reported 2026-09-16, unresolved on the ticket |
What OneView does instead
OneView reads the same Jira data over the REST API and lays it out in its own grid — a hand-built table, not a wrapper around Jira’s Timeline or roadmap components. Filtering and hierarchy are designed to compose rather than trade off: filters apply to the leaf items you’re actually searching for, and a matched item’s ancestor rows stay visible for context regardless of how deep the hierarchy goes — an Epic (or an Initiative above it) doesn’t get treated as “unfiled” just because the filter matched one of its descendants, and it isn’t scoped to a fixed “Level 1” the way the native fix is. It’s the same principle the native Timeline is still building toward for everything past Epic. The honest limit: OneView isn’t a scheduling tool — it has no drag-to-reorder rank feature to compare against the native Timeline’s currently-reported issue with that. Start a free trial and filter a project that has an Initiative level configured to see the difference directly.
Related reading
This page tracks a specific, dated regression in Jira Software’s Timeline — not the broader, permanent limits on Jira’s hierarchy. If your question is really about whether you can add a level above Epic at all, a hierarchy level above Epic in Jira covers the Premium configuration path and why it stays boxed inside Plans even once it exists. And if “grouping” brought you here in the Advanced Roadmaps Plans sense rather than the Software Timeline sense — a different view, with its own, unrelated Group By gaps — see group by Initiative or Status in Jira Plans, which covers why Status and Initiative aren’t Group By fields there either, and how that’s a separate limitation from the flyout regression tracked here.