The ability to archive is only available to premium plan users at double the cost per month. Archiving is a natural way to manage projects for small businesses that do a number of projects across many customers. Asking to archive inactive projects should be a standard feature.

Workaround

As a workaround, it is possible to hide the project from the project listing for end users through the following process (for company-managed projects):

1. Create a permission scheme with all permissions set to empty (so no one would have access to it).
2. Associate the projects you want to archive with this scheme.

This would make the project disappear from the project listing for end users (Jira admins and Site admins would still see the projects in the list).

In addition to that, you can also create a project category called “Archived” to associate with the selected projects. That way, the Site and Jira administrators would see projects with that category and understand they were “archived” for end users.
For further details about the categories, check our documentation: Add, assignee, and delete project categories.