Cron Expression Generator

The Cron Expression Generator is a free cron expression generator that builds standard 5-field cron schedules and explains them in plain English as you type. Set the minute, hour, day, month and weekday fields directly — with support for ranges, lists and step values — or start from a ready-made preset like 'weekdays at 6 PM' and tweak it from there. Presets cover the schedules people reach for most often — every minute, hourly, daily at a set time, weekdays only, once a week, once a month — so you rarely need to build a schedule entirely from scratch.

Crontab syntax is compact by design, which makes it fast to write once you know it and genuinely hard to read at a glance otherwise — is */15 in the hour field every 15 hours or something else entirely? This tool removes the guesswork: every change to a field is validated against that field's allowed range and instantly translated into a sentence like 'At 09:00, on Monday through Friday', so you can confirm the schedule is exactly what you meant before it goes live in a crontab, a CI pipeline or a job scheduler. It also protects against a subtly wrong schedule that technically parses but doesn't do what you intended, such as confusing the day-of-month and day-of-week fields, or writing '30 * * * *' expecting 'every 30 minutes' when it actually means 'at the 30th minute of every hour' — the two only happen to look similar.

It works for classic Unix cron and crontab syntax, Kubernetes CronJob schedules, GitHub Actions' schedule trigger and any other job runner built on the standard 5-field format (minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week). Ranges like 1-5, lists like 1,15,30 and step values like */10 are all supported and validated in every field, not just the minute field.

Building the expression happens instantly and entirely in your browser.