Cron Expression Generator

What is Cron?

Cron is the standard scheduling format used by Unix-like systems, CI/CD pipelines and countless automation tools to describe recurring times — "every day at midnight" or "every 5 minutes on weekdays" — as a compact 5-field expression: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week.

How to use it

1. Paste an existing cron expression into the top field to see it explained in plain English instantly.
2. Or expand Build a cron expression, use a preset or fill in the five fields yourself, and click Build Expression to generate the string and see its explanation.

Each field supports an asterisk for "every value", a specific number, a range like 1-5 (Monday through Friday, where day-of-week runs 0-6 starting at Sunday), a step like */5 (every 5 units), or a comma-separated list like 1,15. Getting a cron expression wrong is a classic source of jobs that silently run at the wrong time, which is why translating it into a sentence you can double-check — before deploying it to a production scheduler — is worth the extra step. This tool's explanations are generated by the widely used cronstrue library rather than a hand-written guess, so the wording matches standard cron semantics.