What Do the Zendesk Ticket Statuses Mean? New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Solved and Closed (2026)

Zendesk has six standard ticket statuses: New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Solved and Closed, and each one tells you whose turn it is to act. New and Open are on your team, Pending waits on the customer, On-hold waits on a third party, Solved can still be reopened by the customer, and Closed is locked for good, set by the system 4 days after Solved by default. Behavior here is checked against Zendesk's ticket-lifecycle documentation (September 2026).

How does a ticket move through the Zendesk lifecycle?

A ticket moves through a predictable arc. A customer emails in and Zendesk creates a New ticket. An agent picks it up and it becomes Open. The agent needs something from the customer and sets it Pending; the customer replies and it flips back to Open. The agent has everything, sends the fix and marks it Solved. A few days later the system files it away as Closed. That's the happy path.

The thing to internalize: status answers the question "whose court is the ball in?" New and Open mean it's on you. Pending and On-hold mean you're legitimately waiting on someone else. Solved and Closed mean the work is done. Here's each one.

What does New mean in Zendesk?

A ticket is New the moment it lands and before any agent has worked it. It signals one thing: no action has been taken yet. New is your intake queue, the tickets that need to be triaged, assigned and acknowledged. A healthy team keeps the New count low and falling, because a growing pile of New tickets means requests are arriving faster than anyone picks them up.

One quirk worth knowing: once a ticket leaves New, it can't be set back to New. There's no "un-triage" button. New exists only at the very start of a ticket's life.

What does Open mean in Zendesk?

A ticket becomes Open when it's assigned to an agent and is in progress. Open is the "ball is in our court" state: it's waiting on your team to investigate, reply or escalate. Zendesk also flips Pending tickets back to Open whenever the customer responds, so Open is where reopened conversations land.

Because Open means "we owe the customer," it's the status your first-reply and next-reply SLA timers run against. A large or stale Open count is the clearest sign of a backlog: these are the tickets where the clock is ticking on you.

When should you set a ticket to Pending?

Set a ticket to Pending when you've responded and now need something back from the requester: an answer to a clarifying question, a screenshot, an order number, confirmation that a fix worked. Pending means the ball is in the customer's court.

Pending takes care of itself: when the requester replies and adds a new comment, Zendesk resets the ticket to Open. You don't have to watch it. This is also why Pending matters for clean reporting and SLAs. Time spent waiting on a customer shouldn't count against your team's response metrics, and Pending is how Zendesk knows to pause those timers.

When should you use On-hold instead of Pending?

On-hold means you're blocked, but not by the customer. You're waiting on a third party: an engineer to ship a bug fix, a warehouse to confirm stock, a vendor to respond, another department to weigh in. The difference from Pending is the who: Pending waits on the requester, On-hold waits on anyone else.

Two things make On-hold different:

• It's optional, and an admin has to activate it. If your agents don't see an On-hold option, that's why. The switch is in Admin Center → Objects and rules → Tickets → Ticket statuses → Status category settings → Activate On-hold ticket status category.
• It's an internal status. The requester never sees On-hold. While a ticket is On-hold, the customer sees it as Open, so your third-party dependency stays out of view.

On-hold lets you separate "tickets my team is working" from "tickets parked while we wait on someone else," which makes your real Open backlog far more honest.

On-hold vs Pending: the difference in one line

This is the most-searched status question, and the rule is simple: Pending = waiting on the customer; On-hold = waiting on a third party. Use Pending when only the requester can unblock you, and On-hold when the requester has done their part and you're waiting on someone else. Mixing them up pollutes your reporting. A queue full of "Pending" tickets that are actually blocked on engineering makes it look like customers are slow to respond when really you are.

What happens when a ticket is marked Solved?

Mark a ticket Solved when you've sent the resolution and believe the issue is handled. Solved doesn't lock anything down; it's a soft close. If the requester replies to a Solved ticket ("that didn't work" or even "thanks!"), Zendesk automatically reopens it. So Solved is best read as "done unless the customer says otherwise."

When does Zendesk close a ticket, and can you close one manually?

Closed is the final state. A Closed ticket is locked: its fields can't be edited, and the requester can no longer reopen it. If a customer replies to a Closed ticket, Zendesk automatically creates a follow-up ticket linked to the original rather than reviving it.

Two facts surprise people here:

• You can't manually close a ticket. Only the system closes tickets, via an automation. By default, the built-in "Close ticket" automation closes a ticket 4 days after it's marked Solved. If an admin deactivates the automations that close tickets, Zendesk closes solved tickets after 28 days anyway; that 28-day rule is a system rule you can't change.
• Closed is forever. There's no reopening a Closed ticket. The follow-up ticket is the only path back.

Solved vs Closed: the difference in one line

Solved is reversible; Closed is permanent. Solved is the agent's signal that the work is done and the customer still has a window to reopen. Closed is the system's signal that the window has passed and the record is archived. In practice you Solve tickets all day and never Close one yourself. The system does that on a timer, and once it has, a new ticket is the only way to continue the conversation.

For how status sits alongside the other fields that drive routing and prioritization, see Zendesk ticket priority and type explained, and for how tickets, views and triggers fit together, our Zendesk ticketing system explained guide.

How do custom ticket statuses work in Zendesk?

For years Zendesk's statuses were fixed. Now admins can create custom ticket statuses for more granular workflows, such as Escalated to Tier 2, Waiting on Engineering, Awaiting Refund Approval or In Review, instead of cramming every situation into the same handful of states. Zendesk lists custom statuses on Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus Suite plans, and on Support Team, Professional and Enterprise. Zendesk began switching them on automatically for Agent Workspace accounts in October 2023, so many accounts already have them.

The mechanism matters: when custom statuses are active, the standard statuses become status categories. You create custom statuses under the Open, Pending, On-hold and Solved categories. New and Closed are system-managed and don't take custom statuses. Every custom status belongs to one category, and the category, not the label, controls behavior. A custom Escalated to Tier 2 status filed under Open behaves like Open for SLAs, triggers, automations and reports, while showing your agents the more descriptive name. On activation, Zendesk also rewrites the status conditions in existing triggers, automations, macros and views from Ticket: Status to Ticket: Status Category, which is what keeps custom statuses from breaking your rules.

Each custom status also has two names: an agent-facing name (what your team sees in the ticket interface) and a separate end-user-facing name (what the customer sees in the Help Center). That split lets you run an internal status like Pending: Legal Review while the customer sees something neutral like In progress.

How do statuses affect SLAs, automations and reporting?

Status isn't just a label. It drives most of Zendesk's automation machinery:

• SLAs. Service-level targets are tied to status. Reply-time targets run while a ticket is Open and are paused by Pending (and, depending on the metric, On-hold) so you aren't penalized for time spent waiting on the customer or a third party. Misusing statuses is one of the fastest ways to breach an SLA by accident, or to pass one you didn't earn. (Full detail in Zendesk SLA explained.)
• Automations. Time-based rules key off status: the "Close ticket" automation acts on Solved tickets after a set number of days, reminder automations can nudge agents about tickets sitting in Pending too long, and you can auto-solve tickets that have been Pending without a reply for a set period.
• Triggers. Event-based rules fire on status changes: when a ticket moves to Solved, send a CSAT survey; when it reopens to Open, notify the assignee.
• Reporting. Your core operational metrics (backlog, resolution time, reopens, time in status) are all sliced by status. If statuses are applied inconsistently, every one of those numbers is suspect.

What status mistakes wreck a Zendesk queue?

• Leaving everything Open. When agents never set Pending or On-hold, every waiting ticket looks like active backlog. Your Open count balloons, SLAs look worse than reality, and you can't tell what needs work right now.
• Using Pending when you mean On-hold. Parking an engineering-blocked ticket in Pending tells your reports the customer is slow to respond. Use On-hold for third-party waits, and ask an admin to activate it if it's missing.
• Solving prematurely to hit metrics. Marking tickets Solved before the customer confirms inflates resolution stats and produces a wave of reopens, which is itself a tracked, unflattering metric.
• Creating custom statuses with no category discipline. A custom status filed under the wrong category behaves wrongly for SLAs and automations. Map each one to the category that matches how it should behave, not just how it reads.
• Forgetting Closed is final. Agents who expect to "reopen" a Closed ticket get stuck. Train them that a follow-up ticket is the correct path.

Can AI keep ticket statuses accurate automatically?

Most status mistakes are consistency problems: people forget to set Pending, sit on Open tickets, or never park a third-party wait as On-hold. That's repetitive judgment an AI agent handles well. Macha runs on top of Zendesk (it isn't a help desk and doesn't replace one). Its agents read an incoming ticket, draft and send the first reply, add tags, set priority and update the status, moving a ticket to Pending when the reply asks the customer a question, so your queue stays clean without anyone remembering to do it.

The pricing model: Macha bills per ticket, one thread with one person charged once however many messages it takes, not per resolution. One plan covers every feature, starting at $299 a month for up to 750 tickets, and the Macha team sets up and monitors your agents. An agent only performs as well as the knowledge and rules you connect, and it's another integration to maintain. For teams whose statuses drift out of sync, automating the bookkeeping is a good place to start. You can try it with $50 of free usage, no credit card and no time limit, and our guide to automating Zendesk with AI covers the workflow patterns in more depth.

Frequently asked questions

What are the Zendesk ticket statuses? The standard statuses are New (received, untouched), Open (assigned, agent working), Pending (waiting on the customer), On-hold (waiting on a third party; optional and admin-activated), Solved (resolution sent, customer can still reopen) and Closed (archived and locked, can't be reopened). Admins can also create custom statuses within the Open, Pending, On-hold and Solved categories.

What's the difference between On-hold and Pending in Zendesk? Pending means you're waiting on the requester (the customer); On-hold means you're waiting on someone else, such as an internal team or an external vendor. On-hold must be activated by an admin, and it's internal: customers see an On-hold ticket as Open.

What's the difference between Solved and Closed? Solved is a soft close set by an agent; if the customer replies, the ticket reopens automatically. Closed is permanent and set only by the system (by default 4 days after a ticket is Solved). A reply to a Closed ticket creates a follow-up ticket instead.

Can you reopen a closed Zendesk ticket? No. Closed tickets are locked and can't be reopened by anyone. The only way forward is a follow-up ticket, which Zendesk links to the original. (A Solved ticket, by contrast, reopens automatically if the requester responds.)

Why doesn't On-hold appear in my account? On-hold is optional and has to be activated. An admin turns on the On-hold status category in Admin Center → Objects and rules → Tickets → Ticket statuses → Status category settings. Until then, agents won't see the option.

Can I create custom ticket statuses in Zendesk? Yes, on Team plans and above. Admins create custom statuses, each assigned to one of the Open, Pending, On-hold or Solved categories, which controls how triggers, automations and SLAs treat it. Each custom status has a separate agent-facing name and end-user-facing name.

Can a ticket go back to New? No. Once a New ticket's status changes, it can't be set back to New. A ticket that needs re-triage should go to Open, or to a custom Open-category status your team uses for triage.

Status behavior checked against Zendesk's help documentation in September 2026. Zendesk occasionally changes defaults and packaging, so confirm specifics in your own Admin Center.