Cron Expression Explainer
Explain a cron expression in plain English and preview next runs.
Standard 5 fields: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. Aliases like @daily also work.
About Cron Expression Explainer
The Cron Expression Explainer translates a five-field cron schedule into plain English and previews its next five run times in your local time zone. Cron syntax is compact and famously easy to get subtly wrong — a swapped field silently turns "every day at 00:05" into "five past every hour".
Paste any expression, read the human-readable meaning, and confirm against the concrete upcoming run times. Preset buttons cover the common schedules so you can start from a known-good pattern and adjust.
How to use
- Type or paste the five-field expression (minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week) into "Cron expression".
- Read the plain-English explanation that appears below it.
- Verify "Next 5 runs (your local time)" against what you expect — concrete timestamps catch mistakes the description hides.
- Or click a preset to load a common schedule and tweak it.
Frequently asked questions
What do the five cron fields mean?
In order: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12) and day of week (0–6, Sunday=0). Asterisks mean "every", slashes give steps (*/15 = every 15), commas list values and hyphens give ranges.
Why does my job run at the wrong time even though the expression is right?
Almost always time zones: the scheduler evaluates cron in its own zone (often UTC), not yours. The preview here uses your local time — compare it against the server's zone to spot the offset.
How do day-of-month and day-of-week interact?
In standard cron, when both are restricted the job runs if either matches — a classic gotcha. "0 0 13 * 5" fires on the 13th and on every Friday, not only Friday the 13th.
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