Cron Expression Examples

Copy a ready-made schedule and see exactly when it runs.

A cron expression schedules a recurring job with five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. It's used by crontab on Linux and macOS, Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub Actions (on: schedule), and most cloud schedulers. The examples below use standard five-field syntax; paste any of them into the cron expression parser to check it reads the way you expect.

Some schedulers extend the format. Quartz (Java) and Spring add a seconds field at the start and use ? in one day field, AWS EventBridge has six fields with a year at the end, and several support L for the last day of the month. Standard cron can't express 'the last day of the month' directly; a common workaround is to run on days 28-31 and have the job check whether tomorrow is the 1st.

Filter schedules

45 entries

Common schedules

Expression	Runs	Note
* * * * *	Every minute
/5 * * *	Every 5 minutes	At minutes 0, 5, 10 ... 55
/10 * * *	Every 10 minutes
/15 * * *	Every 15 minutes	At :00, :15, :30 and :45
/30 * * *	Every 30 minutes
0 * * * *	Every hour, on the hour
15 * * * *	Every hour at 15 minutes past
0 /2 * *	Every 2 hours	At 00:00, 02:00, 04:00 ...
0 /6 * *	Every 6 hours	At 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00
0 0 * * *	Every day at midnight	Same as @daily
0 3 * * *	Every day at 03:00	A common time for backups
0 9 * * *	Every day at 09:00
30 18 * * *	Every day at 18:30
0 9,17 * * *	Every day at 09:00 and 17:00
0 9-17 * * *	Every hour from 09:00 to 17:00
0 9 * * 1-5	Weekdays at 09:00	Monday (1) to Friday (5)
/15 9-17 * 1-5	Every 15 minutes from 09:00 to 17:45 on weekdays	The hour range 9-17 includes 17:00-17:59
0 22 * * 1-5	Weekdays at 22:00
0 10 * * 6,0	Saturdays and Sundays at 10:00
0 0 * * 0	Every Sunday at midnight	Same as @weekly; 7 also means Sunday
0 8 * * 1	Every Monday at 08:00
0 17 * * 5	Every Friday at 17:00
5 4 * * 0	Every Sunday at 04:05
0 0 1 * *	First day of every month at midnight	Same as @monthly
0 0 15 * *	The 15th of every month at midnight
0 0 1,15 * *	The 1st and 15th of every month
0 0 1 /3	Quarterly: January, April, July and October 1st	Months 1, 4, 7 and 10
0 0 1 1 *	Once a year on January 1st at midnight	Same as @yearly and @annually
0 12 * 12 *	Every day in December at noon
0 0 1 * 1	The 1st of the month AND every Monday	Day of month and day of week combine with OR in standard cron

The five fields

In order, separated by spaces.

Field	Allowed values	Note
Minute	0-59
Hour	0-23
Day of month	1-31
Month	1-12 or JAN-DEC
Day of week	0-7 or SUN-SAT	0 and 7 are both Sunday

Operators

Symbol	Meaning	Example
*	Every value	* in the hour field: every hour
,	A list of values	1,15 in day of month: the 1st and 15th
-	A range	1-5 in day of week: Monday to Friday
/	A step	*/10 in minutes: every 10 minutes; 5-59/10: 5, 15, 25 ...

@ nicknames

Supported by Vixie cron, cronie and many schedulers, but not all: check yours.

Nickname	Runs	Equivalent
@yearly	Once a year	0 0 1 1 * (also @annually)
@monthly	Once a month	0 0 1 * *
@weekly	Once a week, Sunday midnight	0 0 * * 0
@daily	Once a day at midnight	0 0 * * * (also @midnight)
@hourly	Once an hour	0 * * * *
@reboot	Once, when the cron daemon starts	Not a time schedule; unsupported in Kubernetes and most cloud schedulers

Good to know

Time zones

Cron runs in the scheduler's time zone. crontab uses the server's local time (often UTC on servers), and GitHub Actions schedules are always UTC. Kubernetes CronJobs use the controller's time zone unless you set spec.timeZone.

Day of month and day of week

If both fields are restricted (neither is *), standard cron runs the job when either one matches. 0 0 13 * 5 runs on every 13th and on every Friday, not only on Friday the 13th.