Cron expression explainer
Paste a cron (crontab) schedule and get it back in plain English, with a field-by-field breakdown and the next few times it will run. Supports lists, ranges, steps, month/weekday names, and @daily-style macros. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Field breakdown
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|
Next runs
Computed in your local time, from your device clock now.
How cron expressions work
A cron schedule is five fields separated by spaces:
minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31),
month (1–12 or JAN–DEC), and
day of week (0–6 or SUN–SAT, where both
0 and 7 mean Sunday). A job runs whenever the current time matches all
of them.
Each field accepts * (every value), a single number, a
list (1,15,30), a range (9-17), and a step
(*/15 = every 15th, or 9-17/2 = every other
value across a range). Macros like @hourly,
@daily, @weekly, @monthly and
@yearly are shorthands for common schedules.
One classic gotcha: when both the day-of-month and day-of-week
fields are restricted (neither is *), the job runs when
either matches — not both. So 0 0 1 * 1 fires on the
1st of every month and on every Monday. This tool follows that
Vixie-cron rule.