What is a cron expression?
A cron expression is a compact way to describe a recurring schedule, used by cron jobs, CI/CD pipelines, and task schedulers. It has five fields — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week — each of which can be a specific value, a range, a step (*/5), or a wildcard (*).
How to use this tool
Pick a preset, or fill in the custom minute/hour/day/month/weekday fields to build an expression. The generated expression is explained in plain English below, validated automatically, and its next upcoming run times are listed using your browser's local timezone. You can also paste an existing cron expression directly into the expression field to explain and validate it.
Example
0 9 * * 1-5 means "every weekday at 9:00 AM".
*/5 * * * *— every 5 minutes (minute 0, 5, 10, … of every hour).30 2 1 * *— at 2:30 AM on the 1st day of every month, a common slot for monthly maintenance jobs.0 0 * * 0— at midnight every Sunday. In the day-of-week field, 0 is Sunday and 6 is Saturday (7 is also accepted as Sunday).
FAQ
What timezone are the next run times in?
Your browser's local timezone, shown above the results. Cron schedulers running on a server may use a different timezone — check your scheduler's configuration.
Does this support 6-field cron with seconds?
This tool supports the standard 5-field cron format (minute hour day month weekday).