New Page Approval Experience - Autumn 2026

The page approval byline card has a refreshed look and feel! You still set up approvals, approve or reject pages, and track progress exactly as before, but the byline is now clearer, easier to scan, and looks great in both light and dark Confluence themes.

In addition, page approvals now have a title and description, like section approvals. This allows requesters to provide clarity on why an approval is needed and what it is for.

More improvements are planned! This guide walks through upcoming changes, and changes that have already been delivered:

Page approval byline

Whenever a page has an approval set up, you'll see an approval card when you click the Approvals app via the byline, as before. It's your single view of everything about that approval:

Title / Menu: The page approval title is displayed at the top of the card, plus a ••• menu for viewing history, editing settings, and resubmitting/cancelling the request.

Status: A badge showing whether the overall approval status is Pending, Approved, Rejected, or Expired.

Progress: A segmented bar showing how many approval decisions have been made versus the minimum amount of required approvals, alongside a label like "1 of 3 approvals required".

Expiry (when set): A chip displaying the expiry date, with a warning icon if the expiry date is within a week.

Approvers: Avatars for the requested approvers (click any avatar to jump to that person's profile). And a View detail link for the approval request details. Each approver's avatar shows their current status at a glance via a coloured border: whether they've approved, rejected, are still pending, or expired.

Approve / Reject: Click to make your decision, if you're one of the approvers.

Putting it all together, you arrive at a byline card that looks something like this:

An approval with three approvers: one has approved, two are pending. With a minimum required approvers of one, the overall status is Approved. A time-based expiry is configured.

Setting up a page approval

If a page doesn't have an approval yet, the byline invites you to start one:

"No approval in progress. Ask your teammates to approve this page."

What the byline looks like before an approval has been set up

Click Request approval to open the setup screen, split into two simple parts:

Approvers: Search for and add the users or groups whose approval you require.
Settings: Provide a title and optional description, choose who gets notified, if and when the approval should expire, and how many approvals are required before the page is considered approved.

A default title of ‘Page Approval’ is provided on every new page approval. However, this can be changed in the Default Settings of a Space by a Space Admin. Navigate to: Space Settings > Integrations > Approvals > Default Settings > Change Default Settings.

The setup screen: approvers on the left; title, description, notification, expiry, and required-approval settings on the right.

Approving or rejecting a page

When you're an approver, clicking Approve or Reject opens a quick confirmation screen where you can optionally leave a comment explaining your decision before submitting it. Any comments are recorded along with the approvers decision in the page approval history (accessed via the byline menu).

The confirmation step after clicking Approve, with an optional comment field

The confirmation step after clicking Reject, with an optional comment field

Viewing the full approval details

Click View detail to see everything about the approval in one place: title, description, overall status, number of approvers, how many approvals are required, who requested it and when, and the expiry date. Below that sits a full table of every approver, their decision, any comment they left, and when they made their decision.

The full picture: approval summary at the top; each approver's decision and comment below

Upcoming changes

The following changes are planned as part of our ongoing improvements to page approvals:

Approvals cannot be removed by clearing the approvers

PLANNED for October 2026

Historically, there has been no way to easily cancel a page approval. With the introduction of the ‘Cancel request’ action, available to requesters via the byline card ••• menu, this is no longer the case. As we now have a dedicated way to cancel a page approval, we are planning to remove the workaround of editing the request, clearing the set of approvers, and saving the request. I.e., you will no longer be able to save an approval with no approvers.

Rejected and Approved overall statuses will be considered final, preventing further approval changes

PLANNED for October 2026

Once a page approval reaches an overall status of Approved or Rejected, that status will become final. Decisions and settings can no longer be changed against that approval; the record is locked in as it stood when the outcome was reached.

Today, decisions and settings can be changed at any time, even after an approval has reached a final Approved or Rejected outcome. That undermines what an approval record needs to provide: a trustworthy, unchangeable, point-in-time account of who approved what, and when. Locking the status once reached addresses this.

It also addresses a second problem: today, there's no reliable way for a requester to signal that a page needs re-review after a rejection and subsequent changes. Locking Rejected as a final state closes off the old approach: an approver simply switching their decision to approved once changes are made, so 'Resubmit request' becomes the intended path instead. Resubmitting discards all prior decisions and re-sends approval notifications to every approver, including those who had already approved (giving the page a fresh review rather than a partial one carried over from before the rejection). This is deliberate: an explicit rejection signals that the required changes are significant enough to warrant a full approval cycle.

Customer Support 🧡

If you have any questions or need assistance with Approvals for Confluence Cloud, please contact our Customer Support team