Tool
Cron expression explainer
Paste a crontab line and get it in plain English, with the next few times it will actually run.
Nobody reads a crontab line correctly on the first try, and a schedule that is wrong in the direction of running too often is expensive on shared hosting.
Paste the five fields and this says what it means in English and when it will actually fire next, which is the part that catches the classic mistakes.
The worst of those is confusing the first two fields: 0 */2 * * * runs every two hours, */2 0 * * * runs every two minutes for one hour a day. Both look reasonable and one of them is not what you meant.
Try: */5 * * * * 0 * * * * */15 * * * * 0 3 * * * 0 0 * * 0 0 0 1 * *
- In English
- At 03:00.
- Runs per day
- 1
- Next runs (UTC)
- Sat 12 Sep 2026, 03:00
Sun 13 Sep 2026, 03:00
Mon 14 Sep 2026, 03:00
Tue 15 Sep 2026, 03:00
Wed 16 Sep 2026, 03:00
Thu 17 Sep 2026, 03:00
Notes
When both day of month and day of week are restricted, cron runs on either — not both. 0 0 13 * 5 is the 13th of the month AND every Friday, not just Friday the 13th. This calculator follows that rule.
The times shown are UTC. Your server's crontab runs in the server's timezone, which on shared hosting is frequently not the one you expect. Check it before trusting a schedule that matters.
Both 0 and 7 mean Sunday in the day-of-week field.