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Cron expression builder — write, explain and preview a crontab schedule

Choose a preset or type an expression. The builder explains what it means, validates each field, and lists the next ten times it would fire — in UTC, which is what most schedulers and PulseTrace's scheduled reports use.

Presets

0 9 * * 1-5

In plain English

At 09:00 on Monday through Friday.

Fields: minute · hour · day of month · month · day of week. When both day fields are restricted, the job runs when either matches.

Next 10 runs (UTC)

  1. 2026-09-15 09:00
  2. 2026-09-16 09:00
  3. 2026-09-17 09:00
  4. 2026-09-18 09:00
  5. 2026-09-21 09:00
  6. 2026-09-22 09:00
  7. 2026-09-23 09:00
  8. 2026-09-24 09:00
  9. 2026-09-25 09:00
  10. 2026-09-28 09:00
Monitor this continuously

PulseTrace's scheduled reports run on the same kind of schedule — pick a cadence and the availability, SLA or security report lands in the inbox before anyone asks.

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How to read the result

  1. 1Five fields: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12), day of week (0–6, Sunday = 0; 7 also means Sunday). Use * for any, a-b for ranges, a,b for lists, */n for steps.
  2. 2When both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, standard cron fires when either matches — a common surprise.
  3. 3Schedulers usually run in UTC; a job meant for 09:00 local in a DST timezone drifts by an hour twice a year. Prefer UTC and convert once.
  4. 4A job that should have run and did not is invisible to the job itself — make sure whatever it produces (a report, a backup, an endpoint's freshness) is checked from outside.

Questions

Is the syntax the same everywhere?
The five-field form is standard across cron, Kubernetes CronJobs and most schedulers. Some (Quartz, AWS EventBridge) add a seconds or year field or use different weekday numbering; check the target.
Why is the preview in UTC?
Because that is what most servers run in, and it is the one timezone with no DST. If your scheduler runs in local time, the same expression fires at different UTC instants across the year.

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