Cron Expression Examples: 20 Common Schedules Explained

CronBeacon Team · April 2026

A cron expression is a string of five fields that defines a schedule. The fields represent, in order: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. Each field can contain numbers, ranges, lists, and step values.

┌───────────── minute (0–59)
│ ┌───────────── hour (0–23)
│ │ ┌───────────── day of month (1–31)
│ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1–12)
│ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of week (0–7, 0 and 7 = Sunday)
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * *

Want to build and test your own expressions interactively? Use our free Cron Expression Generator & Validator.

20 common cron expressions

Here are 20 common cron expressions you can copy and use directly.

* * * * *#1

Every minute

Testing and development only — too frequent for production.

*/5 * * * *#2

Every 5 minutes

Health checks, queue processing, lightweight API polling.

*/10 * * * *#3

Every 10 minutes

Cache warming, dashboard data refresh, metrics collection.

0 * * * *#4

Every hour, on the hour

Log rotation, hourly reports, periodic data syncs.

0 */6 * * *#5

Every 6 hours

Data synchronization, periodic large-scale imports.

0 0 * * *#6

Daily at midnight

Cleanup tasks, daily aggregation, log archival.

0 2 * * *#7

Daily at 2:00 AM

Database backups — off-peak hours minimize impact on live traffic.

30 4 * * *#8

Daily at 4:30 AM

Report generation, data warehouse ETL.

5 0 * * *#9

Daily at 12:05 AM

Avoid the midnight rush — many jobs run at exactly 00:00, so offsetting by a few minutes reduces resource contention.

0 12 * * *#10

Daily at noon

Midday digest emails, lunchtime data refresh.

0 0 * * 1-5#11

Weekdays at midnight

Business-day-only batch processing, weekday reports.

0 8-17 * * 1-5#12

Hourly during business hours (8 AM–5 PM), weekdays

CRM syncs, inventory checks, dashboards that only matter during work hours.

0 22 * * 1-5#13

Weekdays at 10:00 PM

End-of-day processing, nightly reconciliation.

0 9 * * 1#14

Every Monday at 9:00 AM

Weekly digest emails, start-of-week reports.

0 0 * * 0#15

Every Sunday at midnight

Weekly maintenance, full backups, index rebuilds.

0 0 * * 6,0#16

Saturdays and Sundays at midnight

Weekend-only maintenance windows.

0 0 1 * *#17

1st of every month at midnight

Monthly billing runs, invoice generation, subscription renewals.

0 0 1,15 * *#18

1st and 15th of every month at midnight

Bi-monthly payroll processing, semi-monthly reports.

15 14 1 * *#19

1st of every month at 2:15 PM

Monthly reports due in the afternoon, scheduled data exports.

@reboot#20

Once at system startup

Start background services after a reboot. Note: this is a cron shorthand, not a standard 5-field expression. Not all cron implementations support it.

Tips for writing cron expressions

  • Avoid midnight. Many jobs are scheduled at exactly 0 0 * * *. Offset by a few minutes to avoid resource contention.
  • Use UTC. Daylight saving time causes jobs to skip or double-run. UTC eliminates this problem entirely.
  • Test before deploying. Use the cron expression generator to verify your expression shows the right next run times before adding it to your crontab.
  • Monitor after deploying. Once your job is scheduled, set up heartbeat monitoring to know if it actually runs. See our guide on how to monitor cron jobs.

For more production tips, see our full guide on cron job best practices.

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