What do the five fields in a cron expression mean?

The five fields are minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12), and day of week (0–7, where both 0 and 7 represent Sunday).

How does the */15 syntax work?

The slash notation means "every N units". */15 in the minute field means every 15 minutes: at :00, :15, :30, and :45 past each hour.

What timezone does cron use?

Traditional cron uses the system timezone of the server it runs on. Cloud schedulers like AWS EventBridge and GitHub Actions allow you to specify a timezone explicitly in the schedule.

Common Cron Schedule Examples

Cron expressions can be intimidating at first, but most production systems rely on a handful of recurring patterns. This collection shows the ten most widely used schedules from every minute to once a year. Paste any expression into the cron parser to see a plain-English description of when it fires next. Understanding these core patterns makes scheduling jobs, backups, and reports straightforward.

Example

* * * * *
0 * * * *
0 9 * * *
0 9 * * 1-5
0 0 * * 0
0 0 1 * *
0 0 1 1 *
*/15 * * * *
0 */6 * * *
30 8 * * 1

[ open in Cron Parser → ]

FAQ

What do the five fields in a cron expression mean?: The five fields are minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12), and day of week (0–7, where both 0 and 7 represent Sunday).
How does the */15 syntax work?: The slash notation means "every N units". */15 in the minute field means every 15 minutes: at :00, :15, :30, and :45 past each hour.
What timezone does cron use?: Traditional cron uses the system timezone of the server it runs on. Cloud schedulers like AWS EventBridge and GitHub Actions allow you to specify a timezone explicitly in the schedule.

Related Examples

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