Cron expression for every day at midnight

Field breakdown

Next runs

How this schedule works

Cron evaluates the five fields of 0 0 * * * — minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week — against the clock once a minute and starts the job on any minute where all five match, which cronstrue reads as "At 12:00 AM": one run per day.

When to use every day at midnight

Midnight is the default home for nightly backups, daily aggregation of the day that just closed, and log rotation at the calendar boundary: the day is complete, traffic is usually at its lowest, and the date arithmetic inside the job stays simple. Two things are worth settling before you commit to it. Whether midnight in the scheduler's timezone is really midnight where your data lives, and whether every other nightly job on the host also fires at 00:00. Moving a few minutes past the hour costs nothing and avoids the pile-up.

Common mistakes with every day at midnight

Midnight looks like a safe hour, and mostly it is, but the day boundary is exactly where date arithmetic goes wrong. A job that runs at 00:00 and processes "today" processes a day that is zero minutes old; it almost always meant yesterday. Compute the target date explicitly instead of deriving it from the run clock. The second problem is congestion: 00:00 is the most contested minute on any shared host, and on a hosted scheduler it is the most contested minute on the platform. Five past costs nothing. The third is timezone — midnight UTC is mid-afternoon or later across much of the world.

Platform snippets

The same expression, ready to paste into the four schedulers that read five-field cron. The notes below each snippet are the ones that follow from this schedule; the cron expression generator lists every caveat for every platform.

name: Scheduled workflow
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 * * *'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  scheduled:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Run job
        run: echo "Running scheduled job"

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-cron-job
spec:
  schedule: "0 0 * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: job
              image: my-image:latest
              command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "echo Running"]
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

{
  "$schema": "https://openapi.vercel.sh/vercel.json",
  "crons": [
    {
      "path": "/api/cron",
      "schedule": "0 0 * * *"
    }
  ]
}

# Edit your crontab: crontab -e
0 0 * * * /path/to/command

# With logging:
0 0 * * * /path/to/command >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1

Variations

• 5 0 * * * At 12:05 AM Five past midnight. The same nightly slot, clear of the single most contested minute on any shared host and on every hosted scheduler.
• 0 1 * * * At 01:00 AM At 01:00, still overnight but clear of the day boundary. In zones that spring forward at 02:00 this hour always exists, which 02:00 does not.
• 0 0 * * 1-5 At 12:00 AM, Monday through Friday Nightly on weekdays only. Skips the Saturday and Sunday runs, at the cost of a 72-hour gap that Monday's run has to absorb.
• 0 0,12 * * * At 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM Adds a noon run to the nightly one. Halves the worst-case staleness, and gives a midday checkpoint if the overnight run failed.