Cron Parser

Fields: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week (add a leading seconds field for 6-field syntax)

Free Online Cron Expression Parser

Paste a 5-field or 6-field cron expression to get a plain-English explanation of the schedule and the next 5 times it would actually run. It helps operations engineers and developers understand scheduled jobs before deploying a crontab entry or debugging a missed run.

What is a cron expression?

Cron expressions describe a recurring schedule using five space-separated fields — minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week — each of which can be a wildcard (*), a specific value, a comma-separated list, a range (1-5), or a step value (*/5). Some systems (including many CI/CD platforms) support an optional leading sixth field for seconds. Cron expressions are used by the Unix cron daemon, Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub Actions schedules, and most job-scheduling libraries.

How to use this parser

Paste your expression and click Parse — you'll get a plain-English description of the schedule plus the next 5 times it would actually fire, computed from the real scheduling logic rather than just a guess based on the text.

Reading the fields

  • * means "every value" for that field
  • */5 means "every 5th value," e.g. every 5 minutes
  • 1,15,30 is a list of specific values
  • 9-17 is an inclusive range
  • Day-of-week uses 0-6 (or 0-7, since both 0 and 7 mean Sunday), with SUN-SAT aliases also common

A common gotcha

If both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted to something other than a wildcard, standard cron treats them as an OR condition (either one matching triggers the job), not an AND — a quirk inherited from the original Unix cron and a frequent source of confusion when writing schedules that try to combine both.

How to use Cron Parser for related tasks

Paste the cron expression, inspect its plain-English meaning and next run times, and verify the target machine’s timezone separately.

Related tools: Timezone Converter, Unix Timestamp Converter.

Frequently asked questions

What is a cron expression?

A cron expression is a compact schedule format used by cron, most CI/CD systems, and job schedulers to describe when a task should run — five fields for minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week, or six fields if a leading seconds field is included.

What does */5 * * * * mean?

It means "every 5 minutes" — the */5 in the minute field is a step value meaning every 5th minute starting from 0, with every other field left as a wildcard (any hour, any day, any month, any weekday).

Why does day-of-month and day-of-week both being set act unusually?

In standard cron, if both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted (not *), the schedule matches when EITHER condition is true, not when both are — a quirk inherited from the original Unix cron implementation that trips up a lot of people.

Are the next 5 run times shown here guaranteed accurate?

Yes — they're computed by cron-parser, a widely-used scheduling library, not by this tool's own plain-English description logic. The description is a best-effort explanation; the dates are the authoritative part.

Why does my cron job run at the wrong time?

Cron syntax and server timezone are separate concerns; check both the expression fields and the host timezone, especially during DST changes.