Cron Expression Explainer
Type a standard 5-field cron expression to see what it means in plain English.
What this tool does
A cron expression is five space-separated fields — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of
week — used by schedulers like crontab, CI pipelines, and job queues to define recurring run times.
Each field can be a * (every value), a specific number, a range like 1-5, a step
like */15, or a comma-separated list like 0,15,30,45. This tool parses all five
fields and describes in plain English exactly when the schedule fires, entirely in your browser.
Example use case
Cron syntax is compact but easy to misread — it's a common mistake to write a deploy job intended for 9 AM daily and accidentally schedule it for every 9 minutes instead. Pasting an expression here before committing it to a crontab, GitHub Actions workflow, or Kubernetes CronJob catches that kind of mistake immediately, without waiting to see when the job actually fires.
Day-of-month and day-of-week together
When both the day-of-month and day-of-week fields are restricted (not *), standard cron
treats them as an OR condition — the job runs when either one matches, not only when both match.
This tool describes each field's own condition; keep that OR behavior in mind when both fields are set.
Named values like MON or JAN aren't supported — use numeric fields only.