Feature Request: Individual Issue Due Dates

[FrankSteps]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Issues

Body

Feature Request: Individual Issue Due Dates

Problem

Currently, GitHub offers Milestones with due dates, but they are designed to group multiple issues together. There is no simple way to set a due date for a single, individual issue.

For students and developers working on large projects with many issues, it would be useful to assign deadlines to specific issues without having to create a milestone for each one.

Use Case

A computer science student managing a large project with 50+ issues needs to:

• Issue Welcome to GitHub product feedback #1: Research component (due: June 10)
• Issue Feature Request: Select a column when adding an issue to a project #2: Implementation phase (due: June 20)
• Issue Feature request: support release details #3: Testing (due: July 1)

Currently, they would need to create separate milestones for each deadline or track this information externally.

Proposed Solution

Add a simple "Due Date" field directly on individual issues that includes:

• A date picker for easy selection
• Optional automatic notifications (e.g., 1 day before deadline)
• Ability to filter issues by due date ("Due Today", "Overdue", "Due This Week", etc.)
• Display of due date in issue lists and search results
• Integration with GitHub Projects for better visibility

Benefits

• Better organization for academic and personal projects
• Reduces overhead of creating multiple milestones
• Improves task management for solo developers
• Simple and intuitive for users already familiar with GitHub

Example

Instead of cluttering the Milestones section with dozens of entries, a user could simply:

1. Open an issue
2. Click "Add due date"
3. Select a date
4. Done

This is how most modern issue trackers handle this (Jira, Linear, Plane, etc.).

Guidelines

• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

[github-actions[bot]]

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