About the Cron Expression Explainer
A cron expression is a string of five fields that defines a schedule — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. Cron is used everywhere from Linux crontabs to CI pipelines and serverless schedulers, but expressions like '*/5 * * * *' are easy to misread.
This tool translates a cron expression into plain English and shows the next times it will run, so you can confirm a schedule does exactly what you intend before deploying it.
Features
- Translate any 5-field cron expression to plain English
- Preview the next scheduled run times
- Supports ranges, steps, and lists (e.g. */5, 1-5, 0,30)
- Instant and client-side
How to use
- Paste or type a cron expression (5 fields).
- Read the plain-English explanation.
- Check the upcoming run times to confirm the schedule.
Frequently asked questions
What are the five cron fields?
In order: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12), and day of week (0-6, where 0 is Sunday).
What does */5 mean?
The slash is a step value. */5 in the minute field means 'every 5 minutes'. 0 */2 * * * means 'every 2 hours on the hour'.