Toolbench

Cron expression explainer

Unix 5-field cron: English, next 10 fires in UTC and local, days this month that match. Not a pretty-print clone. Nothing is uploaded.

Expression

FieldValueExpanded (cap 20)

Next 10 (UTC / local)

This month (UTC days that can fire)

Ready

How it works

Standard Unix crontab is five fields: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. This page uses that model (Vixie / crontab, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes CronJob). Six fields are treated as Quartz-style seconds + five; next-run listing still steps by minute and only keeps rows whose seconds field includes 0, unless you only care about the English/table.

If both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted (not *), classic cron ORs them: fire if either matches. This page does the same and says so in the English line.

Names: JAN–DEC, SUN–SAT. 0 and 7 are Sunday. Steps: */15, 1-10/2.

Examples

0 9 * * 1-5     weekdays 09:00 — CI / standup job (UTC in GHA)
*/5 * * * *     every 5 minutes — health ping
0 0 * * 0       Sundays 00:00
0 30 4 1,15 *   04:30 on the 1st and 15th
0 0 1 1 *       00:00 1 January

FAQ

Why not crontab.guru? That site is the head term. This page adds UTC vs local next runs, a month grid, and an explicit 5-field vs seconds-prefix note for CI/k8s.

Is GitHub Actions cron UTC? Yes. Kubernetes CronJob is UTC unless you set a timezone in 1.27+. This tool’s “local” column is your browser zone only.

DOM and DOW both set? OR, like Vixie cron. 0 0 1 * 1 fires on the 1st or Mondays, not only Monday the 1st.

@hourly / @daily? Not parsed. Use 0 * * * * and 0 0 * * *.

Does this schedule anything? No. It only explains a string in the page.

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