Cron Expression Generator

A cron expression is five space-separated fields — minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week — that tell a scheduler when to run a job. The syntax is compact but easy to get subtly wrong, and a misplaced asterisk is the difference between a nightly backup and a job that fires 1,440 times a day. This generator shows you the plain-English meaning of every change as you make it.

Each field accepts an exact value (30), a list (0,15,30,45), a range (1-5), a step (*/10) or a wildcard (*). Day of week runs 0–6 with Sunday as 0 (7 is also accepted as Sunday on most systems). The presets cover the schedules people actually need: every five minutes, hourly, daily at midnight, weekdays at 8am, and the first of the month.

The expression works with standard Unix crontab, Linux cron jobs, Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub Actions schedules, pg_cron and most CI systems. Remember that cron runs in the server's timezone unless you set one explicitly — a job scheduled for midnight UTC runs at a different local hour for most of the world. Nothing you type here is sent anywhere.