Cron every year

The cron expression for every year is:

0 0 1 1 *

Runs once a year, on January 1 at 00:00.

Once a year

Standard 5-field cron

Monitor this schedule Open in translator Change it in the generator

Next 10 runs

For 0 0 1 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	Jan 1, 2027, 00:00	Friday
2	Jan 1, 2028, 00:00	Saturday
3	Jan 1, 2029, 00:00	Monday
4	Jan 1, 2030, 00:00	Tuesday
5	Jan 1, 2031, 00:00	Wednesday
6	Jan 1, 2032, 00:00	Thursday
7	Jan 1, 2033, 00:00	Saturday
8	Jan 1, 2034, 00:00	Sunday
9	Jan 1, 2035, 00:00	Monday
10	Jan 1, 2036, 00:00	Tuesday

How to read 0 0 1 1 *

0 0 sets midnight. 1 1 in the day-of-month and month fields is January 1.

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	1	In January	1-12 or jan-dec
Weekday	*	Every day of week	0-7 or sun-sat

Watch out for

@yearly and @annually are shortcuts for 0 0 1 1 * in most cron versions.
A job that runs once a year has a year for its credentials, paths and dependencies to go out of date. Monitor it so you hear on January 1 if it did not run, not months later.

Often used for: Yearly archiving, renewals and resets.

Use it in

crontab

0 0 1 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 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 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

Know when a job on this schedule does not run.

Your job pings Drumbeats when it finishes. If a ping does not arrive on schedule, you get an alert. No SDK, free for up to 50 monitors.

Monitor this schedule Set up with AI agent

Free for up to 50 monitors · Setup in 60 seconds · No credit card required