Jira gives you project templates. It does not give you work item templates. Here is what people use instead.
Every team ends up with a shape of work they recreate constantly: the onboarding checklist, the release ticket with its six subtasks, the incident write-up. Jira will happily template a whole project for you. It has never shipped a way to save a single work item, with its children, as something you can stamp out again.
So people reach for one of four things.
The most common answer, and free. Find the most recent example, clone it, edit the parts that differ.
What the clone dialog offers varies - the work item view is currently mid-rollout, so check what your site actually presents rather than trusting a blog post from two years ago. The structural problem is the same whatever the options say: you are copying a specific past item, not a clean template. It carries that item's status, its comments history in spirit if not in fact, its stale due dates, and whatever was half-finished about it. Teams that work this way slowly accumulate drift, because every new item is a copy of a copy.
Fine for occasional use. Painful as a weekly habit.
A rule can create the parent and its children whenever a trigger fires - a work item type is created, a transition happens, a schedule comes round. This is genuinely the right tool when the structure is fixed and the trigger is automatic.
Two caveats. First, the structure now lives in a rule, so changing the checklist means editing automation rather than editing a work item - that is fine for an admin and awkward for a team lead. Second, budget the steps: Atlassian counts "a single executed part of an automation flow, including triggers, conditions, actions, branches, and loops" as one step, pooled at the organisation level, with 150 a month on Free, 400 per user on Standard, 750 per user on Premium and 1,000 per user on Enterprise. A parent plus five subtasks is not one step, it is seven or more, every time it fires.
You can keep a CSV of the standard structure and import it when you need a new instance.
Atlassian's documentation sets out the requirements: columns for Work item ID,
Work type and Parent, and the rule that "the parent work items must
appear before their subtasks or child work items in the file". You also start the import from
Jira administration - the docs say to "log into your Jira Cloud site as a Jira administrator to
start the import process".
That last point usually ends the conversation. A template only works if the people who need it can use it, and most of them are not Jira admins.
This is a crowded Marketplace category, which is itself the evidence: a dozen vendors would not be competing over a gap Jira had filled. The apps differ mostly in how much machinery they bring - variables, multi-level hierarchies, field mapping, post functions - and therefore in how much setup they demand before they do anything useful.
Disclosure: I build one of them. Simple Issue Templates is at the small end on purpose. You open a work item that is already set up the way you like, save it as a template, and recreate it - with its subtasks - in one click. There is no configuration screen to fill in first. It runs entirely on Atlassian Forge, and it is free for sites of up to ten users.
If you need variables, conditional fields or multi-level hierarchies, one of the larger apps in the category will serve you better, and you should buy that instead.