Cron Expression Generator
Build a cron expression field by field, with a live plain-English description — instantly inside your browser.
What is a cron expression?
A cron expression is a five-field string used by schedulers like cron, GitHub Actions, and Kubernetes CronJobs to describe when a task should run — minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. Each field can be a specific number, a wildcard (* meaning "every"), a list, a range, or a step value, which makes the syntax powerful but easy to get wrong from memory.
How to use it
How the fields work
The five fields are, in order: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12), and day of week (0-6, where 0 is Sunday). Leaving a field as * means "every" value for that field — for example, 0 9 * * 1 means minute 0, hour 9, every day of month, every month, on weekday 1 (Monday) — in other words, every Monday at 9:00 AM.
Features & benefits
Why this runs entirely in your browser
The expression and its description are generated in JavaScript locally in the tab, which means it keeps working offline once the page has loaded and nothing entered here is ever sent to a server.
Common uses
Scheduling a database backup, configuring a GitHub Actions workflow to run on a schedule, setting up a Kubernetes CronJob, or double-checking what an existing cron expression actually means.
Frequently asked questions
A few things people usually want to know before trusting the numbers.
It means "every" value for that field — for example, * in the hour field means the schedule runs at every hour.
Use a step value in the minute field, like */15 * * * *, which triggers at minute 0, 15, 30, and 45 of every hour.
Cron itself has no built-in time zone — it depends entirely on the system or service running the schedule. Check your specific scheduler's documentation for how it interprets time zones.
In standard cron, 0 (and sometimes 7) represents Sunday, with 1 through 6 representing Monday through Saturday.
No. All generation happens locally in your browser. Nothing entered here is sent to a server, stored, or shared.