Cron expression explainer

Paste a crontab schedule to see what it means in plain English and when it runs next. Five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. @daily-style shortcuts work too.

At 09:00, on day 1 of the month.

Time zone: UTC.

Next runs (UTC)	UTC
Tue, 01 Dec 2026, 09:00 UTC	Tue, 01 Dec 2026, 09:00 UTC
Fri, 01 Jan 2027, 09:00 UTC	Fri, 01 Jan 2027, 09:00 UTC
Mon, 01 Feb 2027, 09:00 UTC	Mon, 01 Feb 2027, 09:00 UTC
Mon, 01 Mar 2027, 09:00 UTC	Mon, 01 Mar 2027, 09:00 UTC
Thu, 01 Apr 2027, 09:00 UTC	Thu, 01 Apr 2027, 09:00 UTC
Sat, 01 May 2027, 09:00 UTC	Sat, 01 May 2027, 09:00 UTC
Tue, 01 Jun 2027, 09:00 UTC	Tue, 01 Jun 2027, 09:00 UTC
Thu, 01 Jul 2027, 09:00 UTC	Thu, 01 Jul 2027, 09:00 UTC
Sun, 01 Aug 2027, 09:00 UTC	Sun, 01 Aug 2027, 09:00 UTC
Wed, 01 Sept 2027, 09:00 UTC	Wed, 01 Sept 2027, 09:00 UTC

The gaps between runs aren't all equal, so use a cron schedule (not a fixed period) when you monitor this job.

Get alerted if this job doesn't run

CronPup gives the job a ping URL and alerts you by email, push or Slack when a run is missed or fails. Free for 10 monitors.

Examples

*/5 * * * *: Every 5 minutes.
0 3 * * *: At 03:00, every day.
30 2 * * 1-5: At 02:30, on Monday through Friday.
0 9 1 * *: At 09:00, on day 1 of the month.
0 */6 * * *: At minute 0, every 6 hours.
15 4 * * 0: At 04:15, on Sunday.

Gotchas: in a crontab, a bare % means newline (write \%); cron uses the server's time zone unless CRON_TZ is set; when both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, a run happens on either. More in Cron job not running? A checklist.