JQL text search: contains, phrases and wildcards

Published 2026-09-29 by Sidecar Tools. Every JQL query and error message below was run against a Jira Cloud site on 2026-09-29. Automation steps use Jira's current "work item" wording; older sites say "issue".

Short answer

Use the ~ (contains) operator. To search summary, description, environment and comments at once, use the text field:

text ~ "timeout error"

Jira text search matches words, not character substrings, so this finds work items that contain both words anywhere, in any order.

Queries you can paste

You want	JQL
A word in the summary	`summary ~ "invoice"`
An exact phrase	`summary ~ "\"payment failed\""`
An exact phrase anywhere, open work only	`text ~ "\"connection reset\"" AND statusCategory != Done`
Words starting with a prefix	`summary ~ "deploy*"`
A single-character wildcard	`summary ~ "log?n"`
Similar spellings (fuzzy)	`summary ~ "timeout~"`
Open work mentioning a word in the description	`description ~ "login" AND statusCategory != Done`
A word in any comment	`comment ~ "workaround"`
Summary does not contain a word	`summary !~ "test"`
Newest matches first	`text ~ "cache" ORDER BY updated DESC`

The inner quotes of a phrase must be escaped with a backslash, exactly as shown. Without them, summary ~ "api timeout" matches both words in any order, the same as summary ~ "api" AND summary ~ "timeout".

What fails, and the exact error

Leading wildcards. summary ~ "*ment" fails with "The text query '*ment' for field 'summary' is not valid: the '*' and '?' are not allowed as first character in wildcard query." Wildcards only work at the end or in the middle of a word.
Exact match on summary. summary = "login" fails with "The operator '=' is not supported by the 'summary' field." Text fields only take ~ and !~.
Contains on labels. labels ~ "urgent" fails with "The operator '~' is not supported by the 'labels' field." Labels are exact values; use labels = urgent or labels in (urgent, p1).

Notes

No substring search. Matching is by word, so searching the middle of a word will not find it. Search the whole word, or its start with a trailing *.
Custom text fields take the same ~ and !~ operators, using the field's name in quotes.

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