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* 9-17 * * 1-5Every minute from 09:00 to 17:59, Monday to Friday.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for * 9-17 * * 1-5 in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
* 9-17 * * 1-5 means* 9-17 * * 1-5 fires every single minute, but only between 9am and 5:59pm on weekdays. The wildcard minute combined with an hour range is how you confine a high-frequency job to the hours that matter, instead of running it 1,440 times a day.
This pattern is for genuinely time-sensitive business-hours work: a real-time queue drain, a near-instant sync, or a watcher that only needs to be vigilant while the business is operating. Outside the window it goes completely silent.
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | * | every minute |
| Hour | 9-17 | the range 9-17 (inclusive) of hour |
| Day of month | * | every day-of-month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | 1-5 | the range 1-5 (inclusive) of 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 | * 9-17 * * 1-5 | |
| GitHub Actions | * 9-17 * * 1-5 | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | * 9-17 * * 1-5 | |
| Vercel Cron | * 9-17 * * 1-5 | |
| Quartz | 0 * 9-17 ? * 1-5 * | |
| Spring | 0 * 9-17 ? * 1-5 | |
| AWS EventBridge | * 9-17 ? * 1-5 * |
* 9-17 * * 1-59-17 covers 09:00 through 17:59 (the whole 17:00 hour), so this runs until 17:59, not 17:00. If you need a hard 5pm stop, use 9-16 for the full-minute coverage plus a final 0 17 * * 1-5.
* 9-17 * * 1-5 means: Every minute from 09:00 to 17:59, Monday to Friday. * 9-17 * * 1-5 fires every single minute, but only between 9am and 5:59pm on weekdays. The wildcard minute combined with an hour range is how you confine a high-frequency job to the hours that matter, instead of running it 1,440 times a day.
Use * 9-17 * * 1-5 in the schedule's cron field. 9-17 covers 09:00 through 17:59 (the whole 17:00 hour), so this runs until 17:59, not 17:00. If you need a hard 5pm stop, use 9-16 for the full-minute coverage plus a final 0 17 * * 1-5.
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: * 9-17 ? * 1-5 *. Wrap it as cron(* 9-17 ? * 1-5 *) in the console or CloudFormation.
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 * 9-17 ? * 1-5 *. 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.