GitHub Projects Gets Advanced Search with AND/OR Logic

GitHub has made advanced search generally available in GitHub Projects, letting teams combine filters with AND and OR logic directly in the filter bar of any project view. The update, announced July 16, 2026, also adds a new reviews: filter for pull requests and introduces a 90-day retention policy for deployment statuses. Together, these changes reduce the need to maintain multiple saved views just to answer different project questions.

What happened

Feature	Detail
Advanced search	AND / OR logic now available in all project view filter bars
New filter	reviews: filter for pull request review state
Deployment status retention	Statuses older than 90 days are auto-deleted
API impact	Deleted statuses no longer appear in REST or GraphQL API

GitHub Projects now supports logical AND and OR expressions directly in its filter bar. Before this, if you wanted to answer two different questions about your project (say, “items assigned to Alice” versus “items in review”), you had to maintain a separate saved view for each one. Now you can type a compound expression in a single view and move on.

The feature is live for all project views. No setting to enable, no beta flag to toggle.

What else changed in this release?

Review state filtering for pull requests

A new reviews: filter lets you narrow project items to pull requests by their current review state. It draws on two underlying data points: who has been requested to review, and the latest review each person has submitted. This is useful if you track PRs inside a GitHub Project and want to surface, for example, all items still awaiting a first review.

90-day deployment status retention

GitHub has added an automatic deletion policy for deployment statuses. Any status record older than 90 days is deleted and disappears from both the REST API and the GraphQL API. A deployment’s current (live) state is not affected by this purge, only historical status records age out. If your automation or dashboards query deployment status history, check whether they rely on records older than 90 days.

Why it matters

Project views in GitHub are a lightweight way to manage work without leaving the code. The lack of AND/OR logic was a real friction point: teams either accepted shallow filtering or duplicated views until the project became hard to navigate. Compound expressions fix the root cause rather than adding more workarounds.

The deployment status change is smaller but worth flagging. Teams using the GitHub API to power status dashboards or audit logs need to verify their queries don’t depend on records older than three months. According to GitHub, the current deployment state is preserved, so live-status checks are fine. Historical lookups are the risk.

For teams who rely on workflow automation that reads GitHub project data via API, both the new filter capabilities and the retention policy are worth reviewing in your integration logic.

Our take

This is a sensible quality-of-life improvement. AND/OR filtering is table stakes for any project tool, and it’s genuinely overdue in GitHub Projects. The reviews: filter is a smaller win but practical for teams doing code review tracking inside Projects rather than a separate tool.

The 90-day deployment status purge is the detail most teams will miss and most likely to cause a quiet breakage. If you have a status dashboard or a CI/CD audit script that queries the GitHub API for deployment history, test it now against the 90-day boundary. The current-state preservation is reassuring, but anything that pages through historical statuses needs attention.

If your team is building tighter GitHub integrations, our notes on recent GitHub secret scanning and webhook changes are also worth a read alongside this update.

What to do about it

1. Open an existing GitHub Projects view and test a compound filter using OR or AND in place of a duplicated saved view.
2. If you track pull requests in Projects, add the reviews: filter to views where review state matters.
3. Audit any API scripts or dashboards that query deployment status history and confirm they do not rely on records older than 90 days.
4. Remove or consolidate project views that exist only because AND/OR wasn’t available before.

Start with the deployment status audit: it’s the one change that can break something silently if you ignore it.

Source: GitHub Changelog