every 15 minutes (UTC).
Calculating…
Run times are computed in UTC, in your browser. The fields are minute, hour, day-of-month, month and day-of-week. When both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, standard cron runs when either matches.
How to build a cron schedule
Type an expression or click a preset. The tool parses all five fields, describes the schedule in plain English, highlights which fields are restricted versus “any”, and lists the next five times it will fire in UTC. Use steps like */5 for intervals, ranges like 1-5 for weekdays, and lists like 0,30 for specific minutes.
Getting cron right matters
Cron drives backups, report generation, cache warming, certificate renewals and clean-up jobs. A misread field — confusing day-of-month with day-of-week, or forgetting that */7 doesn’t evenly divide 60 — leads to jobs that silently never run or run too often. Seeing the next real run times removes that guesswork.
🔐 Runs locally: nothing is sent anywhere. Need reliable scheduled jobs, backups or monitoring on your servers? Servnet can help — a UK IT partner since 2001.
Cron — common questions
What are the five cron fields?
In order: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12) and day of week (0–6, where 0 and 7 are both Sunday). A value can be a number, a list (1,15), a range (1-5), a step (*/10) or * for “every”.
How do I run a job every 15 minutes?
Use */15 * * * * — the */15 means “every 15th minute”, and the four stars mean every hour, day, month and weekday. The preset buttons above set this and other common schedules for you.
What happens when day-of-month and day-of-week are both set?
Standard cron (Vixie cron) treats them as an OR: the job runs when either field matches. For example, 0 0 13 * 5 runs at midnight on the 13th of the month AND on every Friday. This tool follows that rule.
What timezone are the run times in?
The next-run preview is computed in UTC, so it is unambiguous. If your server runs in a different timezone, adjust accordingly — many schedulers (and most cloud cron services) also operate in UTC by default.
Why does my schedule show no upcoming runs?
Some expressions are impossible — for example 0 0 30 2 * (the 30th of February). If no valid date occurs in the near future, the tool tells you instead of guessing.
Does this support seconds or special strings like @daily?
This generator uses the classic 5-field crontab format (no seconds field). Shorthands like @daily map to standard expressions — @daily is 0 0 * * *, which you can build here directly.