Cron every month

The cron expression for every month is:

0 0 1 * *

Runs on the first day of every month at 00:00.

12 times a year

Standard 5-field cron

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Next 10 runs

For 0 0 1 * *, 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	Nov 1, 2026, 00:00	Sunday
2	Dec 1, 2026, 00:00	Tuesday
3	Jan 1, 2027, 00:00	Friday
4	Feb 1, 2027, 00:00	Monday
5	Mar 1, 2027, 00:00	Monday
6	Apr 1, 2027, 00:00	Thursday
7	May 1, 2027, 00:00	Saturday
8	Jun 1, 2027, 00:00	Tuesday
9	Jul 1, 2027, 00:00	Thursday
10	Aug 1, 2027, 00:00	Sunday

How to read 0 0 1 * *

0 0 sets midnight. 1 in the day-of-month field is the 1st. * in the month field means every month.

Field	Value	Meaning	Allowed
Minute	0	At the top of the hour	0-59
Hour	0	At 12:00 AM	0-23
Day of month	1	On the 1st	1-31
Month	*	Every month	1-12 or jan-dec
Weekday	*	Every day of week	0-7 or sun-sat

Watch out for

@monthly is a shortcut for 0 0 1 * * in most cron versions.
Standard cron has no way to say the last day of the month. Run on days 28 to 31 and check in the command: 0 0 28-31 * * [ "$(date -d tomorrow +\%d)" = 01 ] && your-command (GNU date). In a crontab, % must be written as \%.
Days 29, 30 and 31 do not exist in every month. A job set to 0 0 31 * * runs only seven times a year.

Often used for: Invoices, quota resets, monthly statements and reports.

Use it in

crontab

0 0 1 * * /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: "0 0 1 * *"
  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: '0 0 1 * *'
      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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