Cron Expression Generator

Build cron expressions visually

This cron expression generator lets you assemble a schedule from dropdowns - minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week - and instantly shows both the resulting expression and aplain-English description of when it fires. You can also type or paste an expression directly into the box (or click a preset) and the tool explains it back to you.

Cron syntax refresher

A standard cron expression has five fields, left to right:

• Minute (0–59), Hour (0–23), Day of month (1–31), Month (1–12), Day of week (0–6, Sunday = 0).
• * means "every"; */15 means "every 15th"; 1-5 is a range; 1,15 is a list.

So 0 9 * * 1-5 reads: minute 0, hour 9, any day of month, any month, Monday through Friday - "at 9:00 AM on weekdays".

Where cron schedules are used

• Linux crontab - the original: scheduled scripts and maintenance jobs.
• Kubernetes CronJobs and GitHub Actions (on: schedule) - same five-field syntax.
• Cloud schedulers - AWS EventBridge, GCP Cloud Scheduler, Azure Functions timers (note: some add a seconds field at the front).

Watch out for the classic gotcha: setting both day-of-month and day-of-week restricts to days matchingeither field in standard cron, not both. And cron runs in the server's timezone - schedule accordingly. Need to inspect timestamps your jobs produce? Try theUnix timestamp converter.

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