Cron Expression Parser
Decode a cron expression into plain English and see its next 5 run times.
Cron expressions pack a recurring schedule into five terse fields — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week — a format that's compact and powerful once you know it, but genuinely hard to read at a glance, especially for anything beyond "every day at a fixed time." Debugging why a scheduled job ran at the wrong time, or verifying a schedule before deploying it, means actually decoding what that string means.
This tool parses a standard 5-field cron expression and translates it into a plain-English description, plus computes the next five actual run times starting from right now — letting you verify a schedule behaves the way you expect before it's live in production. It supports the full standard syntax: wildcards (*), specific values, ranges (9-17), step values (*/15), and comma-separated lists (1,15,30).
When both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted (neither is a wildcard), standard cron semantics treat them as an OR condition — a job runs if either matches — which is a common source of surprising schedule behavior that this tool's next-run-times output makes easy to catch.
How to use Cron Expression Parser
- 1
Enter a cron expression
Type or paste a standard 5-field cron expression.
- 2
Try a preset
Click a common preset to see an example decoded instantly.
- 3
Review the description and next runs
See a plain-English explanation and the next 5 actual run times.
Features
- Plain-English description of what the schedule does
- Computes the next 5 actual run times from now
- Supports wildcards, ranges, steps, and lists
- Common schedule presets for quick reference
Frequently asked questions
Common mistakes to avoid
- Forgetting the OR relationship between day-of-month and day-of-week when both are restricted.
- Assuming cron expressions run in UTC when the actual scheduler may use server local time — always verify against your specific scheduling system.
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