Regex and cron

Cron Expression for Every Minute

At the start of every minute, every hour of every day. Copy it, check the next runs in your time zone and grab a snippet for your platform.

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Cron expression

* * * * *
Customize
*minuteMinute: every minute*hourHour: every hour*day (month)Day of month: every day of the month*monthMonth: every month*day (week)Day of week: every day of the week

At the start of every minute, every hour of every day.

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
* * * * *  /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.

Need scheduled jobs, queues and monitoring that never miss a run? Talk to our team

Quick answer

The cron expression for every minute is * * * * *. Five asterisks leave the minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week unrestricted, so the job starts at the beginning of every minute, 60 times an hour and 1,440 times a day. It is the shortest interval classic crontab supports; anything faster needs a seconds field or a long-running process.

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

How to use this schedule

  1. 1Copy * * * * * 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 does * * * * * mean?

Each asterisk means "every value this field allows". The cron daemon wakes once a minute, compares the current time with every entry, and starts whatever matches. With five asterisks, every check matches, so the command starts at the top of every minute.

That makes * * * * * the best way to test a new crontab line. Within 60 seconds you know whether the path, permissions and environment are right. Cron runs commands with a minimal environment (a short PATH, no shell profile), so something that works in your terminal can fail under cron. Use absolute paths and redirect output to a file while you debug:

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/report.sh >> /tmp/report.log 2>&1

Once it works, change the schedule to the real one. Forgotten test entries running every minute are a classic source of mystery load.

Should a production job run every minute?

Sometimes. Heartbeats, lightweight metric collection and polling a queue that has no push mechanism are reasonable every-minute jobs. Do the arithmetic first, though: 1,440 runs a day means 1,440 process starts. If each run spends 5 seconds starting an interpreter and loading configuration, that is two hours of CPU a day spent on startup alone.

Signs you have outgrown an every-minute cron job:

  • Runs regularly take longer than a minute and start to overlap
  • You need reaction times below a minute
  • Each run repeats expensive setup work

At that point a long-running worker or a systemd service is usually the better tool. If near-real-time is not essential, every 2 minutes or every 5 minutes halves or fifths the load with no code change.

What does each field in * * * * * mean?

FieldValueAllowedMeaning
Minute*0–59every minute
Hour*0–23every hour
Day of month*1–31every day of the month
Month*1–12, JAN–DECevery month
Day of week*0–7 (0 and 7 are Sunday), SUN–SATevery day of the week

Read together: At the start of every minute, every hour of every day.

How do I adjust * * * * * to my own schedule?

Small edits to * * * * * cover most real-world needs:

ExpressionWhat it does
* 9-17 * * 1-5Every minute from 09:00 to 17:59, Monday to Friday
* * * * 1-5Every minute on weekdays only
0-29 * * * *Every minute during the first half of each hour
*/2 * * * *Every 2 minutes, half the load
* * * * * *Every second, in 6-field syntax (not crontab)

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 30 seconds · Every 2 minutes · Every 5 minutes · Every hour

Browse all schedules in the cron schedule library.

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

PlatformWrite it asTime zone
Linux crontab* * * * *Server's time zone; CRON_TZ= in cronie
GitHub Actions- cron: "* * * * *"UTC by default; add timezone: (IANA name). Runs at most every 5 minutes
Kubernetes CronJobschedule: "* * * * *"Set timeZone: (1.27+)
Cloudflare Workers* * * * *UTC only; numbers weekdays from 1 = Sunday, so use names
Vercel Cron Jobs* * * * *UTC only; more than once a day needs Pro (Hobby: once a day)
AWS EventBridge Schedulercron(* * * * ? *)Takes a time zone; legacy scheduled rules are UTC only
systemd timerOnCalendar=*-*-* *:*:00Add a zone after the time, e.g. Europe/London

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

* * * * *  /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 * * * * *?

  • If a run takes 70 seconds, the next one has already started. Use flock -n /tmp/job.lock your-command so a new run exits while the previous one still holds the lock.
  • Cron mails the output of every run to the crontab owner. At 1,440 runs a day, redirect it with >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1 or discard it with > /dev/null 2>&1.
  • GitHub Actions' shortest schedule is every 5 minutes, so * * * * * won't give you per-minute runs there.
  • An every-minute line left over from debugging keeps running forever. Search for * * * * * when you review a crontab.
  • In a zone with daylight saving time, a schedule with * in the minute or hour field follows the wall clock: the spring-forward night loses an hour of runs and the fall-back night repeats one. Servers on UTC never see this.

Frequently asked questions

Yes. A step of 1 keeps every value, so */1 and * match the same minutes. The single asterisk is the conventional form.
Not in standard crontab, whose smallest field is the minute. Use a 6-field scheduler such as Quartz, Spring or node-cron, a systemd timer with a seconds value, or two crontab lines where one sleeps 30 seconds first.
Close to it. Cron checks its table at the start of each minute and launches matching jobs then, but process startup and system load add a small delay, so treat the start time as approximate.
Run it through flock with a lock file, for example flock -n /tmp/job.lock followed by your command. If the previous run still holds the lock, the new run exits immediately instead of starting a second copy.

Last updated by the Playxoft engineering team.

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