# Labels

Team-scoped tags for classifying work, what they are good for, and the one failure mode worth avoiding.

Status: Available

Documentation updated: 2026-09-24

Source: https://docs.orneos.com/docs/labels

Labels are coloured tags on issues. An issue can carry any number of them, and they filter everywhere.

## Team-scoped

A label belongs to a team. Creating `bug` in one team does not create it in another, and two teams can use the same name for different things without colliding. This follows from teams owning their data — see [Companies and teams](https://docs.orneos.com/docs/companies-and-teams).

The practical effect: when you set up a second team, its labels start empty.

## Creating and applying

Create, rename and recolour labels under **Settings → Teams → Labels** for the active team. The current settings interface shows this management panel to company admins. An issue's label picker applies or removes existing labels; it does not create them. Each label has a name and a colour.

Apply them from the issue, or press `l`  on an open issue to open the picker directly.

## What to use them for

Labels are the dimension your team invents. The ones that earn their place tend to be:

- **Area** — `frontend`, `api`, `infra`
- **Type** — `bug`, `feature`, `chore`
- **State that is not status** — `blocked`, `needs-design`, `waiting-on-customer`
- **Effort** — `small`, `large`

Type and area are the two that make [filters](https://docs.orneos.com/docs/filters-and-saved-views) worth saving.

**The one failure mode**

Labels are cheap to create and expensive to maintain. A team that adds one per situation ends up with forty labels, of which six are used, and filtering gets worse rather than better — because a filter is only useful if labels are applied consistently, and nobody applies forty consistently.

Keep the set small enough that everyone knows it. If you need a dimension with more than about eight values, it is probably a [project](https://docs.orneos.com/docs/projects) or a status column, not a label.

## Deleting a label

Deleting a label removes it and its issue assignments for the team. This action is not currently registered in the app's undo history. Check the label and its uses before deleting it; recreating the name does not restore its assignments.

## Related

- [Filters and saved views](https://docs.orneos.com/docs/filters-and-saved-views) — the reason to have labels at all.
- [Issues](https://docs.orneos.com/docs/issues) — the other fields, and which ones a label should not be substituting for.