Cron every 3 minutes

The cron expression for every 3 minutes is:

*/3 * * * *

Runs every 3 minutes: :00, :03, :06 and so on to :57.

480 times a day

Standard 5-field cron

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Next 10 runs

For */3 * * * *, in the timezone you pick. Cron uses the server's timezone.

Times in UTC as of the last site update. They refresh when the page loads in a browser.

Timezone

#	Date and time	When
1	Oct 29, 2026, 22:12	Thursday
2	Oct 29, 2026, 22:15	Thursday
3	Oct 29, 2026, 22:18	Thursday
4	Oct 29, 2026, 22:21	Thursday
5	Oct 29, 2026, 22:24	Thursday
6	Oct 29, 2026, 22:27	Thursday
7	Oct 29, 2026, 22:30	Thursday
8	Oct 29, 2026, 22:33	Thursday
9	Oct 29, 2026, 22:36	Thursday
10	Oct 29, 2026, 22:39	Thursday

How to read /3 * * *

*/3 in the minute field takes every third minute, starting at 0. The other four * fields mean every hour of every day.

Field	Value	Meaning	Allowed
Minute	*/3	Every 3 minutes, from minute 0	0-59
Hour	*	Every hour	0-23
Day of month	*	Every day of the month	1-31
Month	*	Every month	1-12 or jan-dec
Weekday	*	Every day of week	0-7 or sun-sat

Watch out for

60 divides by 3, so the gap stays 3 minutes across the hour: the :57 run is followed by :00. A step that does not divide 60, such as */7, leaves a shorter gap at the end of each hour (:56 then :00).
GitHub Actions does not run schedules more often than every 5 minutes.

Often used for: Pollers and syncs that call a rate-limited API.

Use it in

crontab

*/3 * * * * /path/to/your-script.sh

Edit with crontab -e. Runs in the server's timezone.

Kubernetes CronJob

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-job
spec:
  schedule: "*/3 * * * *"
  timeZone: "Etc/UTC"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          restartPolicy: OnFailure
          containers:
            - name: my-job
              image: busybox:1.36
              command: ["sh", "-c", "date"]

Without timeZone, the schedule follows the timezone of the kube-controller-manager.

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/3 * * * *'
      timezone: "Etc/UTC"
jobs:
  run:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: ./your-script.sh

Without timezone, GitHub runs schedules in UTC. It runs them at most every 5 minutes, and a run can start late when GitHub is busy.

All cron schedules

Cron does not tell you when a job stops

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