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Jira cycle time & lead time calculator

Add Created, Work Started and Done dates for one or more issues and get lead time and cycle time per issue, plus averages and medians across all of them. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

Lead time vs. cycle time

These two get mixed up constantly, and they measure different things. Lead time runs from Created to Done— the full time an issue existed, including however long it waited before anyone started on it. Cycle time runs from Started (first moved to In Progress) to Done— just the active work span.

A rule of thumb: lead time is what the person who asked for the work experiences. Cycle time is what the team controls day to day. A team can have excellent cycle time and still leave requesters waiting, if issues sit untouched in the backlog for a long time before anyone picks them up — that gap is invisible in cycle time but shows up fully in lead time.

Your issues
Add Created, Work Started (In Progress) and Done dates for each issue.
IssueCreatedStartedDone
Results
Lead time and cycle time per issue.
IssueLead timeCycle timeNotes
PROJ-1019.3d7.3d—
PROJ-1027h3h—

Average lead time

4.8d

Median lead time

4.8d

Average cycle time

3.7d

Median cycle time

3.7d

Caveats worth knowing
  • These are simple date differences — wall-clock time between two timestamps. Real cycle-time analysis often excludes weekends, holidays or time an issue spent explicitly blocked; this tool doesn’t, so treat the numbers as a quick estimate, not a precise metric.
  • It uses whatever Started date you enter — typically the first move to In Progress — not a full transition history. If an issue bounced back and forth between statuses, this only sees the dates you typed in.
  • Averages are pulled toward outliers; medians usually give a more representative picture of a “typical” issue when you have more than a few rows.

Questions

What's the difference between lead time and cycle time?
Lead time is the whole clock, from the moment an issue is created to the moment it's done — it includes however long the issue sat in the backlog before anyone touched it. Cycle time starts later, from when work actually began (usually the first move to In Progress) to done. Lead time tells a requester how long something takes end to end; cycle time tells the team how long active work takes once they pick something up.
Which one should I track?
Both, for different questions. Cycle time is the better signal for improving how the team works, since it isolates the part they control. Lead time is the better number to share with stakeholders, since it's the number they actually experience — the time from asking to getting.
Why is my cycle time missing for some issues?
Cycle time needs a Started date. An issue with a Created and Done date but no Started date — common when something skips the board or the status history isn't clean — will show lead time but no cycle time.
What if Done is before Started or Created?
That's flagged as a data issue rather than silently producing a negative duration. It usually means a date was mistyped, or the issue's status history doesn't reflect what actually happened (e.g. it was moved back to In Progress after being marked Done, then Done was never re-set correctly).

A free tool by Guenov Labs.