Cron Expression Explainer — Human Readable Cron
Translate cron expressions into plain English. Free cron explainer — paste any cron schedule and get a human-readable explanation instantly.
Three steps to get started
Enter a cron expression
Type or paste a 5-field cron expression into the input, or click one of the example presets to start quickly.
Read the explanation
The tool instantly translates the expression into plain English, showing what each field means and the combined schedule.
Check upcoming runs
See the next 5 scheduled run times based on your expression to verify the schedule is what you intended.
Understanding cron syntax
Cron expressions have been used since the 1970s to schedule recurring tasks on Unix systems. Despite their age, they remain the standard scheduling language for servers, cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and application task schedulers worldwide.
Quick reference
* * * * *— every minute0 * * * *— every hour (at minute 0)0 0 * * *— daily at midnight0 9 * * 1-5— weekdays at 9 AM*/15 * * * *— every 15 minutes0 0 1 * *— monthly on the 1st at midnight0 0 * * 0— weekly on Sunday at midnight0 2 * * *— daily at 2 AM (common for backups)
Where cron expressions are used
- Linux/Unix crontab — the original cron daemon
- GitHub Actions —
on: schedule: - cron: "0 9 * * 1" - AWS EventBridge / CloudWatch Events — scheduled Lambda functions and step functions
- Kubernetes CronJobs — periodic batch workloads in clusters
- Node.js — libraries like node-cron and node-schedule
- Database jobs — pg_cron for PostgreSQL scheduled queries
All parsing and next-run calculation happens in your browser. No expressions are sent to any server.