Cron syntax is compact enough to be genuinely hard to double-check by
eye — is 0 9 * * 1-5 really “weekdays at 9am”, or did you just write
a job that fires every 9 minutes on a Friday? Our new
Cron Expression Parser answers that in two ways
at once: a plain-language summary, and the actual next 5 times the
job would run.
- Full 5-field support —
*, single numbers, ranges (1-5), lists (1,15,30), and steps (*/15or1-31/2) in every field. - Honest brute force — next-run times come from checking every single minute forward from now, one at a time, capped at roughly 4 years. No clever “jump to the next plausible minute” logic that could silently get an edge case wrong — just a simple loop that’s easy to trust, and an honest “no match found” if an expression (like a February 30th schedule) can never fire within that window.
- Timezone-aware — pick the zone the next run times are shown in; Daylight Saving transitions are handled precisely, not approximated.
- Documented simplification — when both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, this tool requires both to match (AND), where some real crontab implementations switch to OR between those two fields specifically. The FAQ on the tool page spells out exactly when that matters.
- Private by default — parsing and every run-time calculation happen in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Try the default */15 * * * *, or one of the quick presets, and watch
the next 5 run times update as you edit the expression.