What is an epic?

An epic is a backlog item that contains other backlog items:

You can have epics inside epics, down to any level of nesting:

Epics make it easier to organize your backlog and get overviews at varying levels of detail. For example, an epic can represent a high-level feature that your stakeholders understand, with the implementation-level backlog items contained inside the epic. You can also use epics to represent goals or themes that span a collection of features, spread across your backlogs and backlog lists.

To create an epic, create a new backlog item and select "Epic" in the "Type" field:

You can then add new backlog items inside the epic, or move existing backlog items into the epic using drag and drop, cut & paste, or the right-click menu.

Epics behave very much like other backlog items. You can place epics wherever you want in the backlog, either among your other backlog items, or in dedicated backlogs and backlog lists that you create for this.

By default, child backlog items are placed directly inside their parent epic in the backlog. But you can also place them outside of the parent epic, including in other backlogs and backlog lists, within the same project. For example, you can have high-level backlogs with high-level epics, intended for your stakeholders, and with the child backlog items placed separately in other backlogs and backlog lists intended for the development teams.

Here's an example where the backlog items in the "Features" backlog list belong to the epics in the "Epics" backlog list, but are placed outside of the epics:

The status and estimates of an epic are determined from its child backlog items. So, you cannot set the status or estimates of an epic directly. They will always be determined from the child backlog items.

An epic can be assigned to a release. This will assign all backlog items that it contains to the release.

An epic cannot be assigned directly to a sprint or a Kanban board. Instead, assign the backlog items that the epic contains, to the sprint or Kanban board.

A backlog item can have at most one parent epic. So, a backlog item cannot belong to multiple epics.