I was surprised by this weird limitation as well. However I found its easy to workaround -- I made my CI checks provide the skipped status when they run on the

I was surprised by this weird limitation as well. However I found its easy to workaround -- I made my CI checks provide the skipped status when they run on the PR, and then provide the success/failure status when they run on the merge-queue branch. In a GitHub Action, this is was very easy: on: pull_request: merge_group: jobs: build: name: Whatever... if: github.event_name == 'merge_group' Then the task "Whatever" can be added as a required status check, and "skipped" is good enough to allow it to function on the PR side while it actually executes on the merge queue.