Hourly
0 */6 * * *Run four times a day — 00:00, 06:00, 12:00, 18:00.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for 0 */6 * * * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
0 */6 * * * means0 */6 * * * fires four times a day at the quarter-day marks: midnight, 6am, noon, and 6pm. It is one of the most popular "a few times a day" cadences because the marks are easy to remember and align with morning, midday, evening, and overnight windows.
Six-hourly scheduling is the natural home for jobs that should run more than daily but where each run is non-trivial: full backups, large reindexes, or syncs against an upstream that updates a few times a day.
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | 0 | minute = 0 |
| Hour | */6 | every 6 (step) across 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 | 0 */6 * * * | |
| GitHub Actions | 0 */6 * * * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | 0 */6 * * * | |
| Vercel Cron | 0 */6 * * * | |
| Quartz | 0 0 */6 * * * * | |
| Spring | 0 0 */6 * * * | |
| AWS EventBridge | 0 */6 * * * * |
0 */6 * * *All four runs use the same minute (:00). If they each hammer the same downstream service, stagger them — e.g. 15 */6 * * * for a second job — so they do not all fire on the exact same instant.
0 */6 * * * means: Run four times a day — 00:00, 06:00, 12:00, 18:00. 0 */6 * * * fires four times a day at the quarter-day marks: midnight, 6am, noon, and 6pm. It is one of the most popular "a few times a day" cadences because the marks are easy to remember and align with morning, midday, evening, and overnight windows.
Use 0 */6 * * * in the schedule's cron field. All four runs use the same minute (:00). If they each hammer the same downstream service, stagger them — e.g. 15 */6 * * * for a second job — so they do not all fire on the exact same instant.
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: 0 */6 * * * *. Wrap it as cron(0 */6 * * * *) in the console or CloudFormation.
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 0 */6 * * * *. 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.