Cron expression for every day at noon

Field breakdown

Next runs

How this schedule works

Cron evaluates the five fields of 0 12 * * * — 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 PM": one run per day.

When to use every day at noon

Noon is a useful slot for a midday summary, a lunchtime digest, or a half-day checkpoint in a pipeline that also runs overnight: it puts a run in the middle of the working day without competing with the morning peak or the nightly batch window. It is also the natural second run for a job that already fires at midnight, giving a twelve-hour rhythm with two times that need no explanation in a runbook. Confirm which timezone the scheduler uses before assuming noon lands in the middle of anyone's day.

Common mistakes with every day at noon

The classic error is the one the hour field invites: writing 0 0 * * * when noon was meant. Cron has no AM or PM, hour 12 is noon and hour 0 is midnight, and the slip produces a job that runs exactly twelve hours from where it should — far enough away to look like a timezone bug and burn a day of debugging. Read the raw expression rather than a dashboard's rendering of it. Beyond that, a midday run competes with peak traffic in a way a nightly one does not, so a batch benchmarked at 03:00 can behave very differently at 12:00.

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 12 * * *'
  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 12 * * *"
  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 12 * * *"
    }
  ]
}

# Edit your crontab: crontab -e
0 12 * * * /path/to/command

# With logging:
0 12 * * * /path/to/command >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1

Variations

• 0 12 * * 1-5 At 12:00 PM, Monday through Friday Noon on weekdays only. A midday digest that fires on a Sunday is one nobody reads, and skipping it saves two runs a week.
• 0 0 * * * At 12:00 AM Midnight — the other half of the day, and the quieter one. A batch that competes with peak traffic at noon usually will not overnight.
• 0 0,12 * * * At 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM Both halves of the day from one entry, twelve hours apart. The midday run bounds staleness; the midnight run does the heavy work.
• 30 12 * * * At 12:30 PM At 12:30, off the top of the hour. Costs nothing and keeps the job clear of everything else that fires on the hour.