Regex and cron

Cron Expression for Every Friday at 5 PM

At 17:00 every Friday, once a week. Copy it, check the next runs in your time zone and grab a snippet for your platform.

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Cron expression

0 17 * * 5
Customize
0minuteMinute: at minute 0 (on the hour)17hourHour: at hour 17 (5 PM)*day (month)Day of month: every day of the month*monthMonth: every month5day (week)Day of week: only on Friday

At 17:00 every Friday, once a week.

Time zone
Run times, the week view and the snippets use this zone. It starts as your device's zone.
Show times as 9:00 AM instead of 09:00.

Next runs

Each run in your selected time zone, with the same moment in UTC. Daylight saving changes follow cronie, the cron on most Linux servers.
Copy run times (ISO 8601)

Next 7 days

Each square is one hour of local time in your selected zone. Darker squares have more runs. Daylight saving changes are not drawn.

Use it on your platform

Copy-ready config for each scheduler. Dialects differ: some only run in UTC, some can't do seconds, Cloudflare and AWS number weekdays from 1 = Sunday. The snippet handles the conversion and says what changed.
A line for crontab -e on Linux or macOS (Vixie cron, cronie).on.schedule for a workflow, with the timezone field GitHub added in March 2026 (UTC when omitted).A CronJob manifest with the timeZone field (Kubernetes 1.27+).Cron Triggers in wrangler.toml for a Worker. Runs in UTC and numbers weekdays from 1 = Sunday.crons in vercel.json plus the route it calls. Runs in UTC.EventBridge Scheduler (any time zone, recommended by AWS) and a legacy EventBridge scheduled rule (UTC).A .timer unit with OnCalendar=, the systemd replacement for cron.
Runs as writtenRuns in your time zone
crontab -e
Copy crontab -eDownload my-job.crontab
# ┌───────────── minute (0–59)
# │ ┌─────────── hour (0–23)
# │ │ ┌───────── day of month (1–31)
# │ │ │ ┌─────── month (1–12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───── day of week (0–6, Sunday = 0)
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * *  command
CRON_TZ=UTC
0 17 * * 5  /path/to/my-job.sh >> /var/log/my-job.log 2>&1
  • CRON_TZ=UTC is honored by cronie (Fedora, RHEL, Arch). Other cron daemons ignore it and use the server's time zone, so check timedatectl first.
  • Edit with crontab -e. Cron starts the next run even if the last one is still going; wrap the command in flock -n /tmp/my-job.lock to prevent overlaps.

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Quick answer

The cron expression for every Friday at 5pm is 0 17 * * 5. Cron uses a 24-hour clock, so 5 PM is hour 17, and 5 in the day-of-week field is Friday. With minute 0, the job runs once a week at 17:00 on Fridays, in the time zone of whatever evaluates the schedule. Writing 0 5 * * 5 would run at 5 in the morning.

  • Live next runs
  • Any time zone
  • Field-by-field breakdown
  • Seven platform snippets
  • Daylight saving aware

How to use this schedule

  1. 1Copy 0 17 * * 5 with the Copy expression button.
  2. 2Check Next runs in your time zone to confirm it fires when you expect, including around daylight saving changes.
  3. 3Pick your platform under Use it on your platform and copy the ready-made crontab line, workflow, manifest or timer.
  4. 4Need a different time or day? Click Customize to open it in the cron expression generator and change any field.

What do teams run at 5 PM on Friday?

End-of-week jobs: a weekly summary email, a timesheet reminder, a snapshot of the week's metrics, or the switch that starts a deploy freeze for the weekend. Some teams also schedule the opposite, a Friday evening backup or an extra test run, so there is a known-good state before the quiet days.

Two details make this schedule different from a midnight job. First, 17:00 is still working hours for the people who receive the result, so a failure is noticed right away, and so is a duplicate. Second, it is a local time by nature: "5 PM Friday" means something to a team in one office, and nothing in particular to a server running in UTC.

How do I keep 5 PM Friday in local time on a UTC scheduler?

Convert it, and watch for daylight saving time. 5 PM in London is 16:00 UTC in summer (0 16 * * 5) and 17:00 UTC in winter (0 17 * * 5). 5 PM in New York is 21:00 UTC in summer (0 21 * * 5) and 22:00 UTC in winter (0 22 * * 5).

Further west, the conversion can change the day itself: 5 PM Friday in Honolulu is 03:00 on Saturday in UTC, so the expression there is 0 3 * * 6. If your scheduler supports time zones (the timezone: field in GitHub Actions, the Kubernetes timeZone field, EventBridge Scheduler, systemd or cronie's CRON_TZ), set the zone and keep 0 17 * * 5 exactly as written.

What does each field in 0 17 * * 5 mean?

FieldValueAllowedMeaning
Minute00–59at minute 0 (on the hour)
Hour170–23at hour 17 (5 PM)
Day of month*1–31every day of the month
Month*1–12, JAN–DECevery month
Day of week50–7 (0 and 7 are Sunday), SUN–SATonly on Friday

Read together: At 17:00 every Friday, once a week.

How do I adjust 0 17 * * 5 to my own schedule?

Small edits to 0 17 * * 5 cover most real-world needs:

ExpressionWhat it does
0 16 * * 55 PM in London during British Summer Time, written in UTC
0 17 * * 1-55 PM every weekday
30 16 * * 5Friday at 4:30 PM, before people leave
0 17 * * 4Thursday at 5 PM, for teams with Fridays off
0 9 * * 1Monday at 9 AM, the natural end of a weekend deploy freeze

Need something else? Click Customize at the top of the page to open this schedule in the cron expression generator and change any field.

Related schedules: Every weekday at 9am · Every Monday · Every week · Every weekend

Browse all schedules in the cron schedule library.

How do I run 0 17 * * 5 in crontab, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes and the cloud?

PlatformWrite it asTime zone
Linux crontab0 17 * * 5Server's time zone; CRON_TZ= in cronie
GitHub Actions- cron: "0 17 * * 5"UTC by default; add timezone: (IANA name)
Kubernetes CronJobschedule: "0 17 * * 5"Set timeZone: (1.27+)
Cloudflare Workers0 17 * * FRIUTC only; numbers weekdays from 1 = Sunday, so use names
Vercel Cron Jobs0 17 * * 5UTC only; Hobby runs it within the hour (±59 min)
AWS EventBridge Schedulercron(0 17 ? * FRI *)Takes a time zone; legacy scheduled rules are UTC only
systemd timerOnCalendar=Fri *-*-* 17:00:00Add a zone after the time, e.g. Europe/London

In a crontab (crontab -e), the full line looks like this:

0 17 * * 5  /path/to/job.sh >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1

The live panel at the top of the page builds complete, copy-ready files for each platform (workflow, CronJob manifest, wrangler.toml, vercel.json, AWS CLI and systemd units) and can shift the schedule to UTC for platforms that need it.

What can go wrong with 0 17 * * 5?

  • 0 5 * * 5 is 5 AM, not 5 PM. Cron hours run from 0 to 23 with no AM or PM.
  • On UTC-only platforms the local time moves by an hour when daylight saving time starts or ends, so a 5 PM reminder becomes 4 PM or 6 PM for part of the year.
  • Converting a late-afternoon time in the Americas to UTC can push it into Saturday. Re-check the day-of-week field after converting.
  • Messages to people should be idempotent. If a failed Friday run is retried, recipients shouldn't get the weekly email twice.
  • On UTC-only platforms (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, legacy EventBridge rules), the local time this runs at moves by an hour when daylight saving time starts or ends. Use GitHub's timezone:, Kubernetes timeZone, EventBridge Scheduler or cronie's CRON_TZ to pin it to local time.

Frequently asked questions

0 17 * * 5. Minute 0, hour 17 for 5 PM in 24-hour time, and 5 in the day-of-week field for Friday.
The hour field is 24-hour, so 5 means 5 AM. Use 17 for 5 PM. Also check the server's time zone, which is often UTC.
Use a scheduler with a time zone setting and keep 0 17 * * 5, or write it in UTC: 0 21 * * 5 during daylight saving time and 0 22 * * 5 during standard time.
Not with standard cron alone. Schedule 0 17 * * 5 and have the job exit unless the date seven days later falls in the next month. Quartz and Cloudflare Workers offer an L suffix in the day-of-week field for the last given weekday of the month, for example 6L for the last Friday, because both count Sunday as 1.

Last updated by the Playxoft engineering team.

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