What does this cron actually mean?
Cron syntax is the kind of thing you read three times and still re-check. Paste a five-field expression below and get both a human summary and the next five actual firings, computed in your local time zone. No libraries, no network calls.
Notes
- Five-field standard cron only. Six-field variants (Quartz’s seconds field, AWS EventBridge’s year field) and the 7-field k8s-style are not parsed here. Most Linux crontabs, GitHub Actions, and Vercel/Netlify cron functions use the five-field form.
- Day-of-month and day-of-week both restrict. If you set both, a firing needs to match both — which is rarely what you want. The standard Vixie cron behaviour uses OR when either is
*; this tool uses AND throughout (stricter, but predictable). If your real cron uses Vixie OR semantics, trust the next-firings list only when one of those two fields is*. - Time zone: firings are shown in the browser’s local time zone. Production crons typically run in UTC — double-check before copying times into an incident comms channel.