Cron for hourly jobs

Cron expression: 0 * * * *

Hourly jobs are easy to misread as “every minute” if the first field is *. Use the helper to sanity-check before production.

Paste this cron expression into your crontab, or into the schedule field of whichever runner you use — the five-field syntax below is shared by cron, most CI schedulers, and container orchestrators. The sections that follow break the cron job down field by field and flag the timing edge cases that apply to this particular schedule.

What each field means here

A standard crontab line has five fields, read left to right. This is what each one is set to in0 * * * *:

Before you ship this schedule

• Cron runs in the scheduler’s timezone, not the viewer’s. GitHub Actions always runs schedules in UTC; Kubernetes CronJob accepts a timeZone field on newer API versions; a plain crontab follows the host.
• Some engines (Quartz, and several managed cloud schedulers) prepend a seconds field, making the same schedule a six-field expression. Pasting a five-field string into a six-field slot silently changes when it fires.

Using it outside a crontab

GitHub Actions and Kubernetes CronJob both accept this same five-field syntax, so the expression carries over unchanged — what changes is the clock it runs against:

More schedules: midnight daily · weekdays at 9am · every minute · daily at 2am · every 15 minutes · every 30 minutes · every 5 minutes · every 6 hours · every 12 hours · noon · weekly · monthly · yearly · full cheat sheet