10 Common Cron Expression Examples You’ll Actually Use

A Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet

Rather than re-deriving the same handful of schedules from scratch every time, here are the cron expressions that come up constantly in real projects — copy the one you need directly.

1. Every Minute

* * * * *

Runs constantly, once per minute. Mostly useful for testing that a scheduler is actually firing, rarely used in production as-is.

2. Every 5 Minutes

*/5 * * * *

3. Every 15 Minutes

*/15 * * * *

A very common polling interval for lightweight sync jobs or health checks.

4. Every Hour, on the Hour

0 * * * *

5. Daily at Midnight

0 0 * * *

One of the most common schedules overall — nightly batch jobs, backups, report generation.

6. Daily at a Specific Time (e.g. 3:30 AM)

30 3 * * *

Scheduling slightly off the top of the hour (like 3:30 instead of exactly 3:00 or midnight) is a common practice to avoid every scheduled job on a shared system firing at the exact same instant.

7. Weekdays Only, at 9:00 AM

0 9 * * 1-5

A frequent pattern for business-hours-only automation — reports, reminders, or sync jobs that shouldn't run on weekends.

8. Weekly, Every Sunday at Midnight

0 0 * * 0

9. Monthly, on the 1st at Midnight

0 0 1 * *

Common for monthly billing cycles, report resets, or archival jobs.

10. Twice a Day (e.g. Midnight and Noon)

0 0,12 * * *

The comma allows listing multiple specific hour values in a single expression.

Building Your Own Variation

Once you're comfortable with these patterns, most custom schedules are small variations on one of them — swapping the hour, adjusting the day-of-week range, or adding a step interval. Use our Cron Expression Generator to build any variation using plain English, a visual builder, or by starting from one of these presets directly and adjusting it — the tool also shows you the next several actual run times so you can confirm the schedule does what you expect before deploying it.

Conclusion

Most real-world scheduling needs are covered by some combination of these ten patterns. Keep this list handy, and reach for the generator when you need something more specific or want to double-check an expression's exact behavior before relying on it in production.