Cron Cheatsheet

The five fields of a cron expression, the characters that go in them, and ready-made schedules written out for the platforms you are likely to deploy to.

Open Cron Parser Paste any expression to see what it means and when it runs next.

The five fields

Position	Field	Values	Notes
1	Minute	0-59
2	Hour	0-23	In the server's time zone, or UTC on most hosted platforms.
3	Day of month	1-31	A day a month doesn't have is skipped, not moved: 31 runs seven times a year.
4	Month	1-12 or JAN-DEC
5	Day of week	0-7 or SUN-SAT	Both 0 and 7 are Sunday; 1 is Monday.

Special characters

*	Every value of the field.
,	A list: `1,15` is the 1st and the 15th.
-	A range: `1-5` is 1 to 5, both included.
/	A step: `*/10` is every 10th value from the first; `5-59/15` starts at 5.
L W # ?	Last, weekday, nth weekday, no value: Quartz, Spring and AWS, not crontab.

Shorthands

@hourly	0 * * * *
@daily, @midnight	0 0 * * *
@weekly	0 0 * * 0
@monthly	0 0 1 * *
@yearly, @annually	0 0 1 1 *
@reboot	Once, when the cron daemon starts

The trap: both day fields set

When day of month and day of week are both restricted (neither is *), cron runs when either one matches. 0 0 13 * 5 runs on every 13th and on every Friday, not only on Friday the 13th. With one of them left as *, the other alone decides.

Steps restart every hour

A step counts within its field, from the start of the range, and begins again when the next hour or day starts. */7 * * * * runs at :49 and :56 and then at :00, four minutes later. Steps that divide 60 (or 24 for hours) keep an even rhythm; for any other interval use a systemd timer with OnBootSec= and OnUnitActiveSec=.

Every 5 minutes on each platform

Platform	Written as	What differs
Linux crontab	/5 * * *	Five fields, in the server's local time zone. A `%` in the command has to be escaped as `\%`.
GitHub Actions	- cron: '/5 * * *'	Five fields, in UTC unless a `timezone` (an IANA name such as `Europe/Warsaw`) is set next to `cron`. Default branch only. The shortest interval is 5 minutes; when GitHub is busy, runs start late and some are dropped.
Kubernetes CronJob	schedule: "/5 * * *"	Five fields, in the controller's time zone unless `spec.timeZone` is set (Kubernetes 1.27 and later). `concurrencyPolicy` decides what happens when runs overlap.
systemd timer	OnCalendar=*:0/5	Its own calendar syntax, in a `.timer` unit, local time. `hourly`, `daily` and `monthly` match cron, but `weekly` means Monday. `Persistent=true` catches up on runs missed while the machine was off.
AWS EventBridge	cron(0/5 * * * ? *)	Six fields, the last one the year; one day field must be `?`, and day of week 1 is Sunday. Rules run in UTC; EventBridge Scheduler accepts a time zone.
Quartz / Spring	0 0/5 * * * ?	Six fields, seconds first. Quartz needs `?` in one of the day fields and counts Sunday as 1; Spring accepts `?` and numbers days like cron.

Ready-made schedules

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