Cron Expression Generator

What a cron expression is

Cron is the standard way to schedule recurring jobs on Linux servers — backups, report emails, cache clears. A cron expression is five fields that say when a job runs: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. The syntax is terse and easy to get wrong, so this tool turns it into plain English and shows the next five times it will actually run, so you can confirm a schedule before trusting it in production.

How to use it

Type or paste an expression (or pick a preset). The description, a field-by-field breakdown, and the next run times all update instantly. Each field accepts: * (every value), a single number, a range like 1-5, a list like 1,3,5, or a step like */15 (every 15). For example */15 9-17 * * 1-5 means "every 15 minutes, from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday".

The five fields

Minute 0–59 · Hour 0–23 · Day of month 1–31 · Month 1–12 · Day of week 0–6 (0 = Sunday; 7 also means Sunday). Leave a field as * when it should not restrict the schedule.

The day-of-month / day-of-week gotcha

One rule trips everyone up: if both day-of-month and day-of-week are set (neither is *), cron runs when either matches, not both. So 0 0 1 * 1 runs on the 1st of the month and every Monday. This tool follows that real behaviour, so what you see is what your server will do.

Frequently asked questions

What timezone are the next runs in? Your browser local time, for readability. Your server runs cron in its own timezone — check the server clock if they differ.

Does it support seconds or @yearly shortcuts? This tool uses the classic 5-field format. Convert 6-field or keyword forms first.

Is anything sent to a server? No — parsing and the next-run calculation happen entirely in your browser.