Every N minutes
* * * * *Run once every minute, all day, every day.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for * * * * * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
* * * * * means* * * * * is the tightest legal Unix cron cadence: a single asterisk in every field means "every value", so the job fires at the top of every minute, 1,440 times a day. It is the schedule people reach for first when they want something to feel real-time, and the one they most often regret picking in production.
A wildcard minute is fine for a quick health probe or a development watcher, but on a busy host it can stack: if a run occasionally takes longer than 60 seconds, the scheduler will start the next copy before the last one finishes. Most teams that think they want "every minute" actually want "every 5 minutes" plus a lock file, or an event-driven trigger instead of polling.
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | * | every 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 | * * * * * | |
| GitHub Actions | * * * * * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | * * * * * | |
| Vercel Cron | * * * * * | |
| Quartz | 0 * * * * * * | |
| Spring | 0 * * * * * | |
| AWS EventBridge | * * * * * * |
Dialect note: Quartz needs the seconds field, so * * * * * becomes 0 * * * * ?. Without the leading 0, Quartz would fire every second.
* * * * *On GitHub Actions a one-minute schedule is accepted but ignored — shared runners enforce a five-minute floor, so the job realistically fires every 5–10 minutes, never every minute.
* * * * * means: Run once every minute, all day, every day. * * * * * is the tightest legal Unix cron cadence: a single asterisk in every field means "every value", so the job fires at the top of every minute, 1,440 times a day. It is the schedule people reach for first when they want something to feel real-time, and the one they most often regret picking in production.
Use * * * * * in the schedule's cron field. On GitHub Actions a one-minute schedule is accepted but ignored — shared runners enforce a five-minute floor, so the job realistically fires every 5–10 minutes, never every minute.
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: * * * * * *. Wrap it as cron(* * * * * *) in the console or CloudFormation.
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 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.