Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
On-hold is off by default. Turning it on is one switch, and it changes what your response-time figures mean.
Turn it on
- Open Admin Center, then Objects and rules, then Tickets, then Fields.
- Beside the Status field, open the options menu and choose Edit.
- Under Field values, tick Enable On-hold status.
- Click Update field.
It appears in the status field for every agent immediately, between Pending and Solved. Nothing else changes and no tickets move.
Three things become available at the same time, and they are the reason to turn it on rather than the status itself. Views and rules gain a Hours since on-hold condition. Status comparisons place it in that same order, so "status less than On-hold" means New, Open or Pending and "status greater than On-hold" means Solved or Closed. And on Professional and Enterprise, Explore gains On-hold tickets, On-hold time and On-hold time in business hours, while Requester wait time and Current backlog start counting it.
Why you want it
Without on-hold, everything you are waiting on becomes Pending, and Pending means waiting on the customer. Two SLA clocks stop there on that reasoning: Requester wait time and Pausable update. Both keep running on On-hold, which is the whole point of the distinction.
So a team without on-hold books its own delays as customer delays, and those two measures flatter it. Note what does not change: first reply time, next reply time, periodic update and total resolution time run through Pending and On-hold alike, so they were never the numbers being distorted.
Agents only
On-hold is invisible to customers. In the help centre a ticket on hold shows as open, which is honest: from their side you are still working on it.
Agree what it means
The distinction is simple but needs saying once. Pending is waiting on the customer. On-hold is waiting on anyone else, including you. Teams that skip that conversation end up using them interchangeably, which leaves you no better off than before.
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