Cron Expression Generator
Type a cron expression and instantly see its next five run times in your local zone. Test schedules before you deploy them.
Reviewed by the CalcCafe editorial team · Last updated 1 July 2026 · How we test our tools
How it works
Each field is parsed into the set of values it allows, then the tool steps forward minute by minute to find the next times where all five fields match — computed in your browser.
100% client-side — nothing you paste is ever uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
What format is expected?
Standard five-field cron: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week. It supports
*, ranges (9-17), steps (*/15) and lists (1,3,5).What time zone are the runs in?
The next-run times are shown in your device's local time zone.
People also ask
Is cron outdated?
No. The cron daemon still ships with every Linux and Unix system, and the five-field cron expression format has been adopted far beyond it by Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub Actions schedules, cloud schedulers, and job libraries such as Quartz and Spring. Alternatives like systemd timers exist and are sometimes preferred for logging and dependency handling, but the expression syntax you test on this page is not going away.
Are there tools to generate cron expressions?
Yes, and this page is one of them: type an expression and it shows the next five run times in your local time zone so you can confirm the schedule before deploying it. Building an expression is a matter of filling the five fields (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week) with * for any value, comma lists, ranges like 1-5, or steps like */15. Be aware that some systems, such as Quartz and AWS EventBridge, use six or seven fields with a seconds or year field, so check the target platform's format.
How to write cron expression for every 5 minutes?
Use */5 * * * *. The */5 in the minute field means every value from 0 to 59 that is divisible by 5, so the job runs at :00, :05, :10 and so on, while the * in the other four fields matches every hour, day, month, and weekday. If you want runs offset from the top of the hour, give a range with a step, for example 2-59/5 for :02, :07, :12.
What is a cron expression used for?
A cron expression describes a recurring schedule for automated jobs: backups, report generation, cache clearing, log rotation, scheduled emails, and CI pipelines. Its five space-separated fields state the minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week on which the job should fire, and the scheduler runs the command whenever the current time matches all five. Paste any expression above to see exactly when it would next run.
How do I create a cron expression?
Start from the moment you want the job to run and fill the five fields in order: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12), and day of week (0-6, with 0 as Sunday). Use * for any value, commas for lists (1,15), a hyphen for ranges (1-5), and a slash for steps (*/10). For example 30 2 * * 1-5 runs at 02:30 every weekday; type it into this page to verify the next five run times.
Why is it called a cron?
The name comes from chronos, the Greek word for time. It was chosen for the original Unix cron daemon written at Bell Labs in the 1970s, and the schedule file it reads is a crontab, short for cron table. The term has since been generalized to any scheduler that accepts the same expression format.
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