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Cron Expression Explainer

Translate a cron expression into plain English and see the next 10 run times.

What is a cron expression?

A cron expression is a schedule written as five fields — minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week — that tells cron and similar schedulers when to run a job, for example 0 9 * * 1 for every Monday at 09:00.

The five fields

Field	Values
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 Sunday)

Special characters

* every value · , list (1,15) · - range (9-17) · / step (*/15)
Shortcuts: @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly, @yearly

Examples

*/15 9-17 * * 1-5 — every 15 minutes during office hours, Monday to Friday
0 0 1 * * — midnight on the first day of every month
30 2 * * 0 — 02:30 every Sunday

Note: when both day of month and day of week are set, standard cron runs when either matches. The next-run list follows this rule.

Frequently asked questions

Which time zone are the next runs in?

Your browser's time zone. Servers usually run cron in their own time zone, often UTC.

Does it support seconds or years (6–7 fields)?

It uses the standard 5-field format used by Linux crontab and most schedulers.

Why does my schedule never run?

The fields describe a date that does not exist, such as 31 February.