Hourly
0 * * * *Run once an hour, at the top of the hour.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for 0 * * * * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
0 * * * * means0 * * * * fires at minute zero of every hour — the canonical hourly job. The single 0 in the minute field is what makes it hourly; a beginner mistake is to write * * * * * and wonder why it runs every minute instead.
Hourly is the workhorse cadence of back-office automation: it is long enough that almost any job finishes well within the window, and frequent enough to keep reports, caches, and syncs usefully current. Many schedulers accept @hourly as an alias for exactly this expression.
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | 0 | minute = 0 |
| 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 | 0 * * * * | |
| GitHub Actions | 0 * * * * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | 0 * * * * | |
| Vercel Cron | 0 * * * * | |
| Quartz | 0 0 * * * * * | |
| Spring | 0 0 * * * * | |
| AWS EventBridge | 0 * * * * * |
0 * * * *@hourly is a friendly alias for 0 * * * *, but GitHub Actions and pre-1.25 Kubernetes do not understand aliases — write the explicit 0 * * * * to stay portable.
0 * * * * means: Run once an hour, at the top of the hour. 0 * * * * fires at minute zero of every hour — the canonical hourly job. The single 0 in the minute field is what makes it hourly; a beginner mistake is to write * * * * * and wonder why it runs every minute instead.
Use 0 * * * * in the schedule's cron field. @hourly is a friendly alias for 0 * * * *, but GitHub Actions and pre-1.25 Kubernetes do not understand aliases — write the explicit 0 * * * * to stay portable.
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: 0 * * * * *. Wrap it as cron(0 * * * * *) in the console or CloudFormation.
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 0 * * * * *. 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.