Cron Expression Generator

Build cron schedules visually, or paste an expression to see what it means in plain English and the next run times.

Cron expression (5 fields: min hour day month weekday)

Minute (0-59)

Hour (0-23)

Day (1-31)

Month (1-12)

Weekday (0-6)

Description —

Next 5 runs (UTC) —

Features

Visual selector

Human-readable description

Next 5 execution times

How to Use

1. Pick values for minute, hour, day, month, and weekday.

2. Or paste an existing cron expression into the input.

3. See a human-readable description and the next 5 execution times.

About this tool

Cron is the scheduler behind countless servers, CI pipelines and cloud functions, and its five-field syntax is compact but easy to misread. This tool builds and explains standard expressions in the order minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. Adjust the fields or paste an existing line, and you get a plain-language description plus the next five run times so you can confirm the schedule does what you expect before deploying it. Fields accept * for every value, lists such as 1,15, ranges such as 1-5 and steps such as */10. Next run times are calculated in UTC, which is what many servers and cloud schedulers use; convert them to your local time if your system runs cron in a different zone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the five cron fields mean?

In order: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12) and day of week (0–6, where 0 is Sunday). For example, 30 9 * * 1-5 means 09:30 every Monday to Friday.

What do *, comma, dash and slash mean?

* means every value, a comma separates a list (1,15), a dash sets a range (9-17) and a slash sets a step (*/15 in the minute field means every 15 minutes). They can be combined, for example 0-30/10.

Why are the next run times shown in UTC?

Many servers, containers and cloud schedulers run in UTC. If your cron daemon uses a local time zone, shift the listed times by your offset, and remember that daylight saving changes can skip or repeat a run.

Does it support seconds, years or names like MON?

This tool uses the classic five-field format. Six- or seven-field variants with seconds or years (used by Quartz or some cloud services) and special characters such as L, W or # are not interpreted; check your platform's documentation for those.

What happens when both day of month and day of week are set?

In traditional Unix cron, if both fields are restricted, the job runs when either one matches. This tool's next-run preview only lists times where both match, and other schedulers vary too, so avoid combining the two fields unless you have confirmed how your system reads them.