Understand and build cron schedules
Cron's five fields — minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week — are compact but easy to get wrong. Type or paste an expression like */15 9-17 * * 1-5 and the generator explains it in plain English (“Every 15 minutes between 9:00 AM and 5:59 PM, on weekdays”) and lists the next 10 run times.
Edit individual fields, or start from presets such as every 5 minutes, daily at midnight, weekdays at 9 AM or the first of every month. Shortcuts like @daily and month and day names (JAN, MON) are supported. Switch between your local time and UTC, since GitHub Actions, Vercel and most cloud schedulers run cron in UTC.
How to create a cron expression
- 1
Start from a preset or type an expression
Or edit each of the five fields.
- 2
Read the description
Check it says what you intend.
- 3
Check the next runs
In local time or UTC.
- 4
Copy the expression
Paste it into crontab, a CI workflow or a scheduler.
Key features
Plain-English explanations
Know exactly when a job will fire.
Next 10 run times
Handles month lengths and daylight saving.
Local or UTC
Match your scheduler's time zone.
Helpful errors
Out-of-range values and 6-field Quartz syntax are explained.
Common uses
- Server crontabs: Schedule backups, reports and cleanups.
- CI/CD pipelines: Write GitHub Actions and GitLab schedules.
- Cloud jobs: Set up Vercel, AWS EventBridge or Kubernetes CronJobs.
Tips and good to know
- When both day-of-month and day-of-week are set, standard cron runs on days matching either one, not both.
- Convert a run time to a Unix timestamp with the Unix Timestamp Converter.