Free Online Cron Expression Generator

A cron expression is a string of five (or six) fields separated by spaces that defines a recurring schedule. The five standard 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). Cron is used by Unix/Linux systems, CI/CD platforms, and cloud schedulers to automate tasks.

The asterisk (*) is a wildcard meaning 'every possible value' for that field. For example, * in the minute field means 'every minute', and * in the month field means 'every month'. You can combine it with a step value like */5 in the minute field to mean 'every 5 minutes'.

Use the cron expression */5 * * * *. The */5 in the minute field means 'every 5th minute', and the asterisks in the remaining fields mean 'every hour, every day, every month, every day of the week'. This runs at :00, :05, :10, :15, and so on.

Standard Unix cron uses 5 fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. Some systems like Quartz Scheduler and Spring add a sixth field at the beginning for seconds (0–59). This tool supports both formats — select the 6-field option if your platform requires second-level precision.

Set the day-of-week field to 1-5, where 1 is Monday and 5 is Friday. For example, 0 9 * * 1-5 runs at 9:00 AM every weekday. You can also use abbreviated names like MON-FRI on some systems, though numeric values are more universally supported.

Traditional cron uses the server's local time zone. Cloud platforms often default to UTC but allow you to specify a time zone. Always check your platform's documentation. This tool shows next run times in your browser's local time zone and also displays the equivalent UTC time.

Standard cron cannot directly express 90-minute intervals because it works on fixed field boundaries. You would need to list specific minute/hour combinations or use two cron entries — one for even hours at :00 and one for odd hours at :30. Alternatively, some schedulers support interval-based scheduling alongside cron.

Standard cron does not have a 'last day of month' keyword. A common workaround is to set day-of-month to 28-31 and add a shell condition that checks if tomorrow is the 1st. Some extended cron implementations (like Quartz) support an 'L' keyword in the day-of-month field for this purpose.