About custom fields and custom field types


You can add custom fields for tickets, users, organizations, and custom objects.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support

Team, Professional, or Enterprise









You can add custom fields for tickets, users, organizations, and custom objects.
This article contains the following sections:
About custom fields
About custom field types




About custom fields

Custom fields provide the flexibility necessary to capture a variety of customer, ticket,
organization, and custom object details. Not only can the additional information captured by
custom fields be useful for agents to see, but you can also use custom fields in the
following ways:
You can use drop-down list, multi-select, and checkbox custom fields that generate tags in automations, macros, triggers, reports, and views (see Understanding custom ticket fields, tags, and business
rules).
As placeholders in macros, ticket comments, and notification messages (see Placeholders for custom fields).
In reporting (Professional and Enterprise plans) (see Reporting with custom fields).
In search (see Searching custom user and organization
fields).
Drop-down list, multi-select, and checkbox custom fields that generate tags can be
used in automations, macros, triggers, reports, and views (see Understanding custom ticket fields, tags, and business rules).
Lookup relationship fields can be used in triggers and views (see Using lookup relationship fields in triggers and
views).
Currency fields can be used in object and ticket triggers.


Custom user and organization fields are visible only to team members. End users can't see
them. However, admins can make ticket fields visible to end users in addition to team
members.
You can create different types of custom
fields. To get started with custom fields, see:
Adding custom fields to your tickets
Adding custom fields to users
Adding custom fields to organizations
Defining a custom object's schema with custom
fields





About custom field types

The following table details the types of custom fields you can add.
Note: Some field types,
such as drop-down, multi-select, and checkbox, generate tags. Don't re-use tags across
custom fields. In the event that a tag is duplicated on a record, such as a ticket, the
fields associated with the tag become uneditable until the duplication is
removed.




Table 1. Custom field types






Types
Description




Field types


Checkbox
This is used to capture a Yes/No value. Enter a tag to be added to the ticket
when the checkbox is selected. Use the tag to filter your views, triggers, and
automations.



Credit card
This field allows users to enter a credit card number. Only the last four
digits are visible to agents and stored by Zendesk.

Note: Credit card fields are not supported in user and organization
fields.




Currency
This field type is supported for custom objects only. This field allows
users to accurately store financial data in Zendesk. Admins choose the currency
for the field. For a list of supported currencies, see Supported currency codes.
Note: After
records are created using a currency field, only the name of the field is
editable.




Date
Custom date fields allow your users to select a date from a date picker.
Users can choose the current date or any date in the past or future.
Community tip! Colin shows how to use custom date fields to set
reminders for tickets. Check it out in our community forums.

If you
use webhooks or other methods to change a custom date field in tickets, do not
include hours or a timezone. It will cause an error.


Note: The formatting of the field
value and calendar differs based on the language selected in a user's profile.
However, the date is always saved in the YYYY-MM-DD
format.



Decimal
This is for numbers that contain decimals.



Drop-down
This field enables you to create a list of options for users to select. Each
option is a combination of a title and a tag. The title is displayed to users and
the tag is used as a ticket property that you can use in business rules. You can
create up to 2,000 values in a custom drop-down list, with a maximum length of 255
characters per field. You can select which field
appears as the default option in the drop-down list or choose to not display a
field value as a default.


Note: Configuring a default option in a drop-down list only applies to new
tickets that are created by agents through the Agent Workspace or created by
users wherever the ticket form is displayed. If you change an existing ticket
form to one that contains a drop-down list with a default option, the default
option is not displayed.

You can organize drop-down list options into categories (see Organizing drop-down list
options).




Lookup relationship
Custom lookup relationship fields allow admins to define custom relationships
that can exist between tickets, users, organizations, and custom objects. Team
members can then establish those relationships while working on tickets, editing
user profiles, editing organizations, or managing custom objects. Additionally,
for custom objects, admins can define relationships with brands and articles. See
Using lookup relationship fields.
The
lookup relationship field is not supported in search or Explore.


Multi-line
This is a multiple line text input.
The
character limit for this field is 65,536.




Multi-select
This field allows users to choose multiple options from a predetermined list.
You can create up to 2,000 values in a custom multi-select list. You can
organize options into categories (see Organizing drop-down list
options).




Numeric
This is for simple numeric input (no decimals). Values entered in custom
number fields for organizations, users, and custom objects can't exceed 12 digits.
There are no restrictions on the length of values in custom number fields for
tickets.



Regex
You can enter a regular expression to create an input mask to validate proper
entry of numbers in fixed patterns (telephone numbers, zip codes, social security
numbers, etc).
Here's a
regular expression for a U.S. social security number. This expression requires
three sets of numbers (0-9 only) in a pattern of 3-2-4 and each separated by a
dash:
\b[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}\b
Other common regular
expressions include:
URL validation:
^(http|https):\/\/[a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*\.[a-z]{2,5}(([0-9]{1,5})?\/.*)?$

Five-digit zip codes: \b[0-9]{5}(?:-[0-9]{4})?\b

yyyy-mm-dd date:
\b([0-9]{4})-(1[0-2]|0?[1-9])-(3[0-1]|[1-2][0-9]|0?[1-9])\b



Regular expressions can't exceed 255 characters.
For more information about regular expressions, see Regular Expressions Language - Quick Reference on the
Microsoft website. Zendesk uses Ruby to process regular expressions, which might
vary slightly from other language implementations. For differences, see Using Regular Expressions with Ruby on the
regular-expressions.info website.



Roll-up summary (EAP)
Roll-up summary fields are read-only fields that can be added to parent
objects in a parent-child relationship. They provide an
aggregate calculation of the associated child records. For example, a parent
Service record record could have a roll-up summary field named Total
cost, which reflects the sum of all associated child Line item
records. Values are re-calculated any time a child record is created, deleted,
or the child record's summarized field is updated.
For more information,
see Adding roll-up summary fields to parent
objects.



Text
This is a simple single line text input.
The
character limit for this field is 65,536.




Relationship field types


Lookup
Lookup relationship fields allow admins to define custom relationships that
can exist between tickets, users, organizations, and custom objects. Team members
can then establish those relationships while working on tickets, editing user
profiles, editing organizations, or managing custom objects. Additionally, for
custom objects, admins can define relationships with brands and articles. See
Using lookup relationship fields.
The
lookup relationship field is not supported in search or Explore.


Parent-child (EAP)
Parent-child relationship fields allow admins to define a hierarchical
relationship between custom objects. Child objects share data and permissions with
the parent object. For example, orders could have a parent relationship to a child
object for line items.
Note: Parent-child relationship fields are supported for
custom objects only.
For more information, see Defining parent-child relationships for custom
objects.








{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838961562-About-custom-fields-and-custom-field-types",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838961562-About-custom-fields-and-custom-field-types",
"headline": "About custom fields and custom field types",
"description": "You can add and configure various types of custom fields for tickets, users, organizations, and custom objects to capture specific data and use it in automations, reporting, and business rules.",
"articleSection": "Ticket customization",
"datePublished": "2021-10-16T05:29:25+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-05-14T20:58:44.092881+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838961562-About-custom-fields-and-custom-field-types"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"url": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk"
}
}
