Every N minutes
*/15 * * * *Run four times an hour — :00, :15, :30, :45.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for */15 * * * * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
*/15 * * * * means*/15 * * * * lands on the quarter-hours, the same rhythm clocks and calendars use, which makes it easy to reason about and easy for humans to predict. It fires 96 times a day and is the most popular cadence for jobs that feed near-real-time dashboards.
Quarter-hour scheduling pairs naturally with billing, metering, and SLA windows that are themselves measured in 15-minute blocks. Because the marks align with the wall clock, logs from a */15 job are trivial to eyeball — every timestamp ends in :00, :15, :30, or :45.
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */15 | every 15 (step) across minute |
| Hour | * | every hour |
| Day of month | * | every day-of-month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | * | every day-of-week |
The same cadence written for the seven cron dialects you are most likely to meet. Copy the line for the system you target — the field count and day-of-week numbering differ between them.
| Scheduler | Expression | Copy |
|---|---|---|
| Unix / crontab | */15 * * * * | |
| GitHub Actions | */15 * * * * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | */15 * * * * | |
| Vercel Cron | */15 * * * * | |
| Quartz | 0 */15 * * * * * | |
| Spring | 0 */15 * * * * | |
| AWS EventBridge | */15 * * * * * |
*/15 * * * *Writing 0,15,30,45 * * * * is identical to */15 but harder to read and easy to typo. Prefer the step form unless you genuinely need irregular minutes.
*/15 * * * * means: Run four times an hour — :00, :15, :30, :45. */15 * * * * lands on the quarter-hours, the same rhythm clocks and calendars use, which makes it easy to reason about and easy for humans to predict. It fires 96 times a day and is the most popular cadence for jobs that feed near-real-time dashboards.
Use */15 * * * * in the schedule's cron field. Writing 0,15,30,45 * * * * is identical to */15 but harder to read and easy to typo. Prefer the step form unless you genuinely need irregular minutes.
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: */15 * * * * *. Wrap it as cron(*/15 * * * * *) in the console or CloudFormation.
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 */15 * * * * *. Remember Quartz numbers Sunday as 1, the opposite of Unix.
Browse the full set of cron pattern pages, or jump to the interactive tools: the cron expression builder for designing a schedule from scratch, the cron cheat sheet for a side-by-side reference, the cron timezone translator for moving a schedule between zones and dialects, and the GitHub Actions cron picker for DST-stable CI schedules.