Common cron patterns
Patterns that come up over and over: weekday mornings, frequent polling, monthly billing, quarterly close. Each recipe links to an interactive builder pre-filled with the expression so you can tweak it and copy a platform-specific snippet.
Every weekday at 9 AM
unix50 9 * * 1-5Runs Monday through Friday at 09:00, the most common business-hours start trigger.
Every 15 minutes during business hours
unix5*/15 9-17 * * 1-5Fires every 15 minutes between 09:00 and 17:00 on weekdays.
First day of the month at midnight
unix50 0 1 * *Runs once a month at 00:00 on the 1st — perfect for monthly reports or billing cycles.
Last Friday of the month
quartz60 0 0 ? * 6LQuartz / AWS pattern using the L modifier — fires on the last Friday of each month.
Every 5 minutes
unix5*/5 * * * *The shortest interval GitHub Actions reliably supports; fires twelve times per hour.
Every hour on the half
unix530 * * * *Fires once an hour at minute 30. Useful for offset workloads that should not collide with the top-of-hour spike.
Nightly at 02:00 UTC
unix50 2 * * *Common backup or batch-job window: runs every day at 02:00 UTC.
Weekly on Sunday at 02:00
unix50 2 * * 0Runs once a week, Sunday morning at 02:00 — quiet hours for most production traffic.
Quarterly on the 1st
unix50 0 1 1,4,7,10 *Runs at midnight on Jan 1, Apr 1, Jul 1, and Oct 1 — quarterly cadence.
Every 2 hours on weekdays
unix50 */2 * * 1-5Fires at the top of every even-hour during weekdays — twelve times per workday.