Cron Expression Explainer

Decode a 5-field cron expression (minute, hour, day, month, weekday) into plain English, and see the next five run times in your local timezone.

Meaning

FieldValueMeaning
Next 5 runs (local time)

    How to use the cron explainer

    Cron is the standard scheduler on Unix and Linux systems, and its expressions are also used by cloud schedulers, CI pipelines, and task queues. A cron expression is five fields separated by spaces: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week.

    Type an expression into the box and the tool explains each field in plain language. For example, 0 * * * * means "every hour, on the hour" — the minute field is fixed at 0, while every other field is a wildcard *. The table shows each field's raw value and its meaning, and below it you get the next five times the schedule would trigger, calculated in your browser's local timezone.

    Supported syntax includes single values (5), ranges (1-5), lists (1,15,30), and steps (*/15 or 0-30/10). In the weekday field, 0 and 7 both mean Sunday. If a field contains something the tool does not support — such as the special L or W tokens used by some extended cron flavors, or a value out of range — it reports an error rather than guessing.

    Common examples

    • 0 * * * * — every hour on the hour.
    • */15 * * * * — every 15 minutes.
    • 0 9 * * 1 — at 09:00 every Monday.
    • 30 23 * * * — at 23:30 every day.

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