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Cron Expression Generator

Build and validate cron expressions visually with a plain-English schedule description. Copy-paste ready output.

* * * * *

every minute

Common presets

Minute(0–59)
*
Hour(0–23)
*
Day of Month(1–31)
*
Month(1–12)
*
Day of Week(0–6)
*

Cron format reference

┌── minute (0–59)
│ ┌── hour (0–23)
│ │ ┌── day of month (1–31)
│ │ │ ┌── month (1–12)
│ │ │ │ ┌── day of week (0–6, Sun=0)
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * *
*Every value
*/nEvery n-th value
a-bRange from a to b
a,b,cSpecific values
1-5Monday to Friday
0 0 * * *Daily at midnight

Cron fields: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, weekday

Cron is five (or six with seconds) independent fields; daylight saving can shift wall-clock triggers—prefer UTC for infra tasks when possible.

Validate expressions in staging; some platforms use quartz extensions incompatible with vanilla cron.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a cron expression?

A cron expression is a string of 5 fields (minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week) that defines a recurring schedule. It is used by Unix cron, GitHub Actions, cloud schedulers, and many other systems to run tasks automatically at specified times.

What does an asterisk (*) mean in cron?

An asterisk (*) means 'every value'. For example, * in the minute field means 'every minute', and * in the hour field means 'every hour'. It is the wildcard that matches all valid values for that position.

How do I run a job every 15 minutes?

Use the step syntax: */15 * * * *. The */15 in the minute field means 'every 15th minute'. Similarly, */2 in the hour field would mean 'every 2 hours'.

What is the difference between 0 and 7 for Sunday in cron?

In standard cron, both 0 and 7 represent Sunday in the day-of-week field. Most cron implementations accept either. Monday is 1, Tuesday is 2, and so on through Saturday (6).

Does cron support timezones?

Classic Unix cron uses the system timezone of the server. Many modern schedulers (Kubernetes CronJobs with timezone field, GitHub Actions with timezone property) support explicit timezone settings. Always verify the timezone of the server running your cron jobs.

What is the maximum cron frequency?

Standard cron has a minimum resolution of 1 minute. For sub-minute scheduling you need a different mechanism such as a continuous loop with a sleep interval, or a task scheduler that supports seconds (like Quartz in Java, or the 6-field cron in some tools).

Cron Expression Generator | Tools Hub