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Cron Expression Parser

Translate cron expressions into plain English — with a library of common examples.

Runs 100% in your browser — nothing is uploaded

About this tool

The Cron Parser translates standard 5-field cron expressions (minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week) into a plain-English description of when the job will run. It supports wildcards (*), step values (*/15), ranges (1-5), and lists (1,3,5).

Cron is the Unix standard for scheduled jobs. It is used by GitHub Actions (schedule trigger), AWS EventBridge Scheduler, Kubernetes CronJob, Linux crontab, Heroku Scheduler, and virtually every cloud platform's task runner. Getting the syntax right is error-prone — this tool gives you instant feedback before you commit an expression to a configuration file.

A library of common expressions (every hour, daily at midnight, weekdays at 9am, every 15 minutes, monthly, and weekly) lets you start from a working baseline and modify from there. All parsing is done locally in the browser with zero network requests.

Frequently asked questions

What do the five fields mean?
From left to right: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12), day of week (0-7, where 0 and 7 both mean Sunday). Each field can be a number, *, a range (1-5), a step (*/15), or a list (1,3,5).
What does */ mean in cron?
*/n means "every n units". So */15 in the minute field means "every 15 minutes". */2 in the hour field means "every 2 hours".
What is the difference between "day of month" and "day of week"?
You can restrict a job to both a specific day of the month AND a specific day of the week — in that case, the job runs when EITHER condition is true (OR logic). Use * for one field if you only want to restrict by the other.
Does this support the @hourly, @daily shorthand?
Not yet. The parser handles 5-field standard cron syntax. @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly, and @reboot are shorthand supported by some cron implementations but not part of standard 5-field cron.

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