Cron example
Cron Business Hours Every 15 Minutes
*/15 9-17 * * 1-5Every 15 minutes, between 09:00 AM and 05:59 PM, Monday through Friday
Open in the cron expression generatorThree restrictions at once: every fifteenth minute, only between 9 AM and 5 PM, only Monday to Friday. That is 36 runs a day and 180 a week, against the 672 an unrestricted quarter-hourly job would rack up — the same responsiveness during the hours that matter, at a quarter of the cost.
By NaveenKumar T · Updated · 5-field crontab expression
What each field means
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */15 | Every 15 minutes, starting at minute 0 |
| Hour | 9-17 | Hours 9–17 |
| Day of month | * | Every day |
| Month | * | Every month |
| Day of week | 1-5 | Monday through Friday |
Next 5 run times
Computing the next runs in your timezone…
How the fields combine
Cron fires when every field matches simultaneously. The minute field matches at :00, :15, :30 and :45; the hour field matches from 9 through 17; the day-of-week field matches Monday through Friday. The result is the intersection: four runs in each of nine hours, on each of five days.
Note where the schedule actually ends. Because the hour range includes 17, the final run of the day is at 17:45, not 17:00 — the minute field keeps firing right through the last matching hour. If the job must stop at five o'clock exactly, the hour range has to be 9-16 with an extra line for the 17:00 run, or you accept the 45 extra minutes.
What belongs on a schedule like this
This is the shape for work whose value is tied to somebody being at a desk: ticket and lead syncs, order imports from a partner that only trades in business hours, staffing or queue-depth alerts, dashboard refreshes, and anything that pages a human when it fails. Running it overnight would generate alerts nobody will action until morning.
It is also a cost-control pattern. Cutting 72 percent of the runs off a job that calls a metered API or spins up a container is real money, and it removes the overnight noise from your logs so the on-call view stays quiet unless something genuinely broke.
Tuning the window
Widen the day by moving the hour range, for example 8-18 for an earlier start and later finish. Change the resolution by editing only the minute step: a step of 5 triples the frequency, a step of 30 halves it. Add a coverage gap over lunch with a list of ranges such as 9-12,14-17.
For all-week coverage at the same times, drop the day-of-week restriction. For all-day coverage at the same resolution, drop the hour range and you are back to every 15 minutes. Preview any variant in the cron expression generator — three interacting fields are exactly where mental arithmetic starts to fail.
Build a variant of this schedule with dropdowns and check the next ten runs before you install it.
Open the cron generatorRelated cron examples
Browse every schedule on the cron expression generator, read the cron expression syntax guide for the rules behind the five fields, or the developer tools guides for the longer explanations.