Cron Expression Generator
Pick a minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week — each either "every" or a specific value — and get back both the cron expression and a sentence describing when it fires.
Overview
A cron expression is five space-separated fields — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week — each either an asterisk (meaning "every") or a specific value. Getting the field order or a value out of range wrong is a common source of jobs that silently never run, or run far more often than intended. This tool builds the expression from validated dropdowns and number fields instead of free-text entry, so the result is always syntactically valid, and shows a plain-English description alongside it so you can double check it actually means what you intended before pasting it into a crontab.
This is a generator, not a parser — it doesn't accept and explain an arbitrary cron string you already have. Build your schedule with the fields below.
Examples
Every day at 9:00 AM
Minute: 0, Hour: 9, all other fields: every
0 9 * * *
Every Monday at 9:00 AM
Minute: 0, Hour: 9, Day of week: Monday, all other fields: every
0 9 * * 1
How It Works
- For each of the five fields, choose "Every" or "Specific" — for a specific value, set the number or pick from the dropdown.
- Click Generate Cron Expression.
- Read the cron expression and the plain-English description together to confirm the schedule is what you meant.
Use Cases
Scheduling a cron job or CI pipeline trigger
Build the schedule field for a crontab entry, a GitHub Actions `schedule:` trigger, or any other system that accepts standard 5-field cron syntax.
Checking an existing schedule idea before deploying it
Reconstruct a schedule you have in mind using the dropdowns and read the generated description to confirm it matches your intent before committing it.
Tips
- When both Day of month and Day of week are set to a specific value at the same time, standard cron treats them as OR, not AND — the job runs on day D of the month, or on that weekday, whichever comes first, not only when both match at once.
FAQ
No. The cron expression and description are both built entirely in your browser.
No — this tool only generates a new expression from the fields above. Explaining an arbitrary existing cron string is a different tool.
Standard cron treats the two fields as OR, not AND, when both are restricted at the same time — the description explicitly spells this out with "or" whenever it applies.
No, this generates standard 5-field cron (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week), the format used by crontab and most schedulers.