Cron: every month
Midnight on the first day of each month, twelve runs a year. @monthly is a shorthand for the same expression.
Open in Cron Parser The expression is filled in: change it and watch the next runs.
Expression
0 0 1 * * Meaning
At 00:00 on day 1 of every month
Next 5 runs
Your time zone
The same schedule on other platforms
| Platform | Written as | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Linux crontab | 0 0 1 * * | Five fields, in the server's local time zone. A % in the command has to be escaped as \%. |
| GitHub Actions | - cron: '0 0 1 * *' | 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: "0 0 1 * *" | 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=monthly | 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 0 1 * ? *) | 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 0 1 * ? | Six fields, seconds first. Quartz needs ? in one of the day fields and counts Sunday as 1; Spring accepts ? and numbers days like cron. |
Common mistakes
Day 31 skips months
0 0 31 * *runs only in the seven months that have a 31st. Cron doesn't move the run to the last day of a shorter month.The last day of the month
Standard cron can't say it. Quartz and EventBridge have
L(cron(0 0 L * ? *)). In crontab, run on days 28-31 and let the job check that tomorrow is the 1st:0 0 28-31 * * [ "$(date -d tomorrow +\%d)" = 01 ] && job.sh. Note the\%: an unescaped%ends the command in a crontab line.Monthly reports
A report for the month that just ended belongs on the 1st, as here, but a few minutes after midnight gives late data time to arrive:
30 0 1 * *.