Cron Expression Generator

A cron expression is a string of five fields (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week) that defines a recurring schedule. Cron is used in Unix/Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines, cloud services (AWS, GCP), and task schedulers to automate jobs at specific times.

The five fields are: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12), and day of week (0-6, where 0 is Sunday). Special characters include * (any), , (list), - (range), and / (step). For example, */5 * * * * means "every 5 minutes".

Type your schedule in plain English — like "every weekday at 9am" or "first Monday of each month" — and the AI converts it to the correct cron expression. You can also use the visual builder to click and select each field, or paste an existing expression to see what it means.

Yes. After generating or entering a cron expression, the tool shows the next 5 scheduled run times so you can verify the schedule is correct before deploying it. Times are displayed in your local timezone.

This tool supports both standard 5-field cron expressions (crontab, GitHub Actions, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Scheduler, Kubernetes CronJobs) and Quartz 6-field expressions (seconds minutes hours day-of-month month day-of-week) used in Java/Spring, Quartz Scheduler, and other JVM-based systems. Use the toggle at the top to switch between modes.

Quartz cron expressions use 6 fields: seconds (0-59), minutes (0-59), hours (0-23), day-of-month (1-31), month (1-12), and day-of-week (0-6). This format is used by the Quartz Scheduler library (Java), Spring Framework @Scheduled annotations, and many JVM-based scheduling systems. The key difference from standard Unix cron is the leading seconds field, which allows sub-minute scheduling precision.