Quartz

Last verified: 2026-05-15

Six fields, optionally seven

Quartz cron has six required fields and one optional field: second minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week [year]. The leading second field is what distinguishes Quartz from Unix cron, and the optional year field at the end is unique to Quartz.

Day-of-week numbering

Quartz uses 1 = SUN, 2 = MON, …, 7 = SAT. This is one off from Unix cron (where 0 = SUN, 6 = SAT) and is the most common source of mistakes when porting expressions between platforms. cronpreview translates automatically when you switch dialects.

The ? wildcard

Quartz requires that you use ? in either day-of-month or day-of-week — but not both. The reason: specifying both a day-of-month and a day-of-week is ambiguous, so Quartz forces you to pick one. 0 0 9 * * MON-FRI is invalid; 0 0 9 ? * MON-FRI is correct.

L, W, # — special characters

• L (last) — L in day-of-month means "last day of month".6L in day-of-week means "last Friday of month".
• W (weekday) — 15W means "the weekday nearest to the 15th".
• # (nth) — MON#1 means "the first Monday of the month".

Quartz vs. Quartz.NET vs. Spring

The original Quartz Scheduler (Java) and the C# port Quartz.NET have a few quiet differences — Quartz.NET allows * in both day-of-month and day-of-week (treats both as wildcards), while strict Quartz rejects it. Spring's @Scheduled(cron=...) uses Quartz-flavored 6-field syntax but with its own minor differences in step behavior. Always test against the runtime you actually deploy on.

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