Regex and cron

Cron Expression for Every Month

At 00:00 on the 1st of every month, the same as @monthly. Copy it, check the next runs in your time zone and grab a snippet for your platform.

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Cron expression

0 0 1 * *
Customize
0minuteMinute: at minute 0 (on the hour)0hourHour: at hour 0 (midnight)1day (month)Day of month: on the 1st of the month*monthMonth: every month*day (week)Day of week: every day of the week

At 00:00 on the 1st of every month, the same as @monthly.

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 0 1 * *  /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 month is 0 0 1 * *, which is also what @monthly expands to. The 1 in the day-of-month field picks the first day, and 0 0 sets the time to 00:00, so the job runs twelve times a year. You can pick any day from 1 to 28 and any time; days 29 to 31 are skipped in shorter months.

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

How to use this schedule

  1. 1Copy 0 0 1 * * 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.

Which day of the month should a monthly job use?

Any day from 1 to 28 runs every month without exception. Days 29, 30 and 31 don't exist in every month, and cron doesn't move a run to the nearest valid date; it simply skips that month:

Day of monthMonths it runs in
1 to 28All 12
2911, plus February in leap years
3011 (never February)
317 (January, March, May, July, August, October and December)

So 0 0 31 * * is not "monthly at month end"; it is a job that silently disappears in five months of the year. For the end of the month, see the last day of the month, which needs a small workaround in standard cron.

What time of the month is best for a monthly job?

The 1st at 00:00 is the default because the previous month is complete at that moment, which suits invoicing, monthly reports and archiving. It is also the busiest moment of the month on a typical server, since most @monthly jobs start then. If the job doesn't depend on the exact moment the month closes, move it later on the 1st (0 4 1 * *) or to another day entirely, such as the 2nd or the 15th, when a retry can't collide with other month-end processes. For billing that customers see, pick a time when someone is around to handle a failure.

What does each field in 0 0 1 * * mean?

FieldValueAllowedMeaning
Minute00–59at minute 0 (on the hour)
Hour00–23at hour 0 (midnight)
Day of month11–31on the 1st 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 00:00 on the 1st of every month, the same as @monthly.

How do I adjust 0 0 1 * * to my own schedule?

Small edits to 0 0 1 * * cover most real-world needs:

ExpressionWhat it does
0 4 1 * *04:00 on the 1st, after the midnight rush
0 0 15 * *Mid-month, on the 15th
0 9 1 * *9 AM on the 1st, for reports people read
0 0 1,15 * *Twice a month, on the 1st and the 15th
0 0 1 */2 *Every two months, on the 1st of January, March, May and so on

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: First Monday of the month · Last day of the month · Every quarter · Every year

Browse all schedules in the cron schedule library.

How do I run 0 0 1 * * in crontab, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes and the cloud?

PlatformWrite it asTime zone
Linux crontab0 0 1 * *Server's time zone; CRON_TZ= in cronie
GitHub Actions- cron: "0 0 1 * *"UTC by default; add timezone: (IANA name)
Kubernetes CronJobschedule: "0 0 1 * *"Set timeZone: (1.27+)
Cloudflare Workers0 0 1 * *UTC only; numbers weekdays from 1 = Sunday, so use names
Vercel Cron Jobs0 0 1 * *UTC only; Hobby runs it within the hour (±59 min)
AWS EventBridge Schedulercron(0 0 1 * ? *)Takes a time zone; legacy scheduled rules are UTC only
systemd timerOnCalendar=*-*-01 00:00:00Add a zone after the time, e.g. Europe/London

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

0 0 1 * *  /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 0 1 * *?

  • Days 29–31 are skipped in months that don't have them. Use a day from 1 to 28 for a job that must run every month.
  • If the server is down at the scheduled minute, plain cron doesn't retry until next month. Use anacron, a systemd timer with Persistent=true, or monitoring that alerts when a run is missing.
  • A job at 00:00 on the 1st in UTC runs on the last evening of the previous month in the Americas. If it closes "this month", compute the month in the business's time zone.
  • Adding a day of the week changes the meaning: 0 0 1 * 1 runs on the 1st and on every Monday, because cron combines the two day fields with OR.
  • 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 0 1 * * runs at 00:00 on the first day of every month. It is identical to the @monthly macro.
It only runs in months that have 31 days, seven times a year. Cron does not move the run to the 30th or the 28th; months without a 31st are skipped.
Use 0 0 15 * * for midnight on the 15th, or change the first two fields for another time, such as 0 9 15 * * for 9 AM.
Add a step to the month field: 0 0 1 */2 * runs on the 1st of January, March, May, July, September and November.

Last updated by the Playxoft engineering team.

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