Cron expression for every weekday

Field breakdown

Next runs

How this schedule works

Cron evaluates the five fields of 0 0 * * 1-5 — 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, Monday through Friday": 5 runs per week. The day-of-week field is numbered 0 to 6 with Sunday at 0, so 1-5 selects Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Day of month is left as an asterisk, so the calendar date is unrestricted and only the weekday decides.

When to use every weekday

Restricting a daily job to Monday through Friday is worth doing whenever the weekend runs would be pure cost: reports nobody reads until Monday, reminders that should not fire on a Saturday, batch work whose input only arrives on business days. The saving is real, since two fifths of the invocations disappear, but the schedule is calendar-blind. It will still fire on a public holiday in the middle of the week, so if holidays matter the job itself has to check the date and exit early.

Common mistakes with every weekday

Weekday schedules go wrong on the calendar, not in the parser. The range 1-5 is Monday to Friday and nothing more: it knows nothing about public holidays, company shutdowns, or the markets where the business week runs Sunday to Thursday. If any of that matters, the job has to check the date itself. The other trap is the both-day-fields rule. Adding a day-of-month value to a weekday schedule makes cron fire when either field matches, so 0 0 1 * 1-5 runs on every weekday and on the 1st — including when the 1st is a Sunday.

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 * * 1-5'
  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 * * 1-5"
  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 * * 1-5"
    }
  ]
}

# Edit your crontab: crontab -e
0 0 * * 1-5 /path/to/command

# With logging:
0 0 * * 1-5 /path/to/command >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1

Variations

• 0 9 * * 1-5 At 09:00 AM, Monday through Friday Weekdays at 09:00 rather than midnight, which is when a business-day job usually wants to land: at the start of the day it reports on.
• 0 0 * * MON-FRI At 12:00 AM, Monday through Friday The same range with the days named. A range of names reads correctly to anyone, whatever they assume about cron's numbering.
• */30 * * * 1-5 Every 30 minutes, Monday through Friday The weekday restriction applied to a half-hourly job instead of a daily one — the day-of-week field constrains any cadence, not just daily ones.
• 0 0 * * 6,0 At 12:00 AM, only on Sunday and Saturday The exact inverse: Saturday and Sunday only. Between them the two schedules cover every day of the week with no overlap.