Cron Explainer

Paste a five-field cron expression and get a plain-English description of when it runs.

Cron expression (minute hour day month weekday)

Plain English

Walkthrough

How to use it

Paste a standard 5-field cron expression: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week.
The plain-English explanation updates as you type.
Use * for "every," comma-separated lists (1,15), ranges (1-5), and step values (*/15) — all are supported.
If a field can't be parsed, the status line explains which one.

Use cases

When you'd use this

Reviewing a coworker's cron job. Quickly confirm a scheduled task actually runs when the comment says it does, without mentally parsing five asterisk fields.

Writing a new scheduled job. Build the expression field by field and read back the plain-English description to confirm it matches what you intended.

Debugging a job that ran at the wrong time. Check whether the schedule itself is wrong before assuming it's a timezone or server issue.

FAQ

Common questions

Does it account for timezone?

No — cron expressions themselves don't encode timezone; the explanation describes the schedule as written. The actual run time depends on the server or scheduler's configured timezone.

What format does it expect?

Standard 5-field Unix cron: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12), day of week (0-6, Sunday=0).

Does it support 6-field cron with seconds?

Not currently — this covers the standard 5-field format used by crontab and most schedulers.