Announcing parent-child relationships and roll-up summary fields for custom objects

Announced on | Rollout on
May 14, 2026 | May 14, 2026

Zendesk is excited to announce a powerful new way to structure your custom data in Zendesk with parent-child relationships.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

In addition to lookup relationship fields, which define one-to-many relationships between records, you can now specify hierarchical relationships using parent-child relationships. Within parent-child relationships, child records are tied to the lifecycle of their parent.

You can also convert eligible lookup relationship fields to parent-child relationships in Admin Center. During conversion, the existing lookup field is updated in place rather than creating a new field. Note that this conversion is not reversible.

When using parent-child relationships, there is a new custom field type available: roll-up summary fields. These read-only fields are available when a custom object is the parent in a parent-child relationship. You can add a roll-up summary field that automatically calculates data from the associated child records. For example, this could be a total count of items, the sum of costs, or minimum and maximum values.

Some example use cases unlocked by this release include:

Returns

Parent object: Return

Child object: Items

Roll-up summary: COUNT total number of items being returned

Project management

Parent object: Project

Child object: Tasks

Roll-up summary: COUNT of tasks with a status of completed, to track progress

Banking

Parent object: Account

Child object: Transactions

Roll-up summary: MAX of transaction dates, to reflect the most recent transaction date

E-commerce

Parent object: Order

Child object: Line items

Roll-up summary: SUM of the prices for all line items, to show the total cost of the order

For more information, see Defining parent-child relationships for custom objects.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Zendesk understands that as your data models become more complex, you need better ways to ensure data integrity and gain insights. Parent-child relationships ensure that when a parent record is deleted, the child records are cleaned up, too, to prevent "orphaned" data.

Additionally, roll-up summary fields eliminate the need for manual calculations or external middleware to surface insights on related records. By bringing this logic natively into Zendesk, you can build more efficient workflows.

You can also create many-to-many relationships by creating two parent-child relationships from the child object to the parent object.

What do I need to do?

No action is required if you are on Professional and above suite plans or Support enterprise plan. Then you can create parent-child relationships and add roll-up summary fields.

If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.