Cron Expression Examples: 20 Common Schedules Explained
The most common cron expressions for daily, weekly, monthly, and custom schedules. Copy-paste ready with explanations.
Understanding Cron Expression Syntax
A cron expression consists of five fields separated by spaces, each representing a time unit:
┌───────────── minute (0-59)
│ ┌───────────── hour (0-23)
│ │ ┌───────────── day of month (1-31)
│ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1-12)
│ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of week (0-6, Sunday=0)
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * *Special characters let you define complex schedules:
*— any value (wildcard),— list separator (e.g.,1,3,5)-— range (e.g.,1-5for Monday through Friday)/— step (e.g.,*/5for every 5 units)
20 Common Cron Expressions
Basic Intervals
* * * * * — Every minute. Useful for health checks and real-time monitoring.
*/5 * * * * — Every 5 minutes. Common for API polling, cache refresh, and queue processing.
*/15 * * * * — Every 15 minutes. Good for sync jobs and report generation.
*/30 * * * * — Every 30 minutes. Suitable for moderate-frequency data updates.
Hourly
0 * * * * — Every hour at minute 0. Standard for hourly batch jobs.
0 */2 * * * — Every 2 hours. Good for data aggregation that doesn't need to be hourly.
0 */6 * * * — Every 6 hours (4 times a day). Common for backup verification and summary reports.
Daily
0 0 * * * — Every day at midnight. The classic daily cron job for log rotation, cleanup tasks, and daily reports.
0 9 * * * — Every day at 9 AM. Perfect for sending daily digest emails or generating morning reports.
0 0,12 * * * — Twice daily (midnight and noon). Good for semi-daily sync jobs.
Weekly
0 9 * * 1 — Every Monday at 9 AM. Ideal for weekly reports and team notifications.
0 9 * * 1-5 — Every weekday at 9 AM. Perfect for business-hours-only tasks.
0 2 * * 0 — Every Sunday at 2 AM. Common for weekly database maintenance and full backups.
0 18 * * 5 — Every Friday at 6 PM. Great for end-of-week reports.
Monthly
0 0 1 * * — First day of every month at midnight. Standard for monthly billing, invoicing, and reports.
0 9 1 * * — First day of every month at 9 AM. Monthly summary emails.
0 0 15 * * — 15th of every month at midnight. Mid-month processing.
Specific Schedules
0 9 * * 1,3,5 — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9 AM. Alternating-day tasks.
30 4 1,15 * * — 1st and 15th of each month at 4:30 AM. Bi-monthly payroll processing.
0 0 1 1 * — January 1st at midnight. Annual tasks like yearly reports or license renewals.
Build Your Own Cron Expression
Use our Cron Expression Generator to visually build and validate cron expressions. It shows human-readable descriptions and the next 5 execution times so you can verify your schedule before deploying.