Cron Reference

Cron Every Weekday at 6PM Expression (2026)

Cron expression 0 18 * * 1-5 means At 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday.

Cron every weekday at 6pm expression is 0 18 * * 1-5. This 2026 guide explains weekday scheduling semantics, timezone checks, and day-end reliability.

Cron Expression

0 18 * * 1-5
0Minute
18Hour
*Day
*Month
1-5Weekday

Common use cases

  • End-of-day weekday reconciliation pipelines
  • Weekday-only exports for partner systems
  • Evening status summary generation for operations teams
  • Business-day closeout workflows that skip weekends

How to use this cron schedule

If you are searching for cron every weekday at 6pm expression, the exact cron format is `0 18 * * 1-5`. This means minute zero, hour eighteen, every day and month, but only weekdays one through five. In standard Unix cron, that maps to Monday through Friday at 6:00 PM. In 2026, this cadence is a common choice for day-end automation because it captures complete business-day activity while avoiding weekend compute and alert noise. It is especially useful for reconciliation, outbound exports, and summary jobs consumed the next morning by operations and finance teams.

Weekday schedules still require platform validation before production rollout. Confirm weekday numbering semantics and scheduler timezone, because UTC defaults can shift perceived local execution time. Validate next-run previews and document expected business-time behavior in your runbook. Keep the underlying workload idempotent and add retries with clear upper bounds so transient dependency failures recover safely. If outputs are high-impact, include counts and checksums in logs so operators can verify completeness quickly without manual data inspection during incident response.

For robust 2026 reliability, keep this 6 PM weekday cron narrowly scoped and chain downstream tasks explicitly after successful completion. That design shortens debugging time and prevents one failure from blocking unrelated processes. Track duration trends, failure streaks, and last-success age, then alert on sustained degradation rather than one delayed run. Use this page as the canonical copy source for `0 18 * * 1-5`, and follow related pages for 9 AM weekday or weekly Sunday alternatives when business cadence changes. For debugging text parsing in cron-triggered jobs, the sibling tool at https://regextest.com can help.

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Platform usage examples

Linux / Unix — crontab
# Edit your crontab
crontab -e

# Add this line to run every weekday at 6pm expression (2026)
0 18 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/script.php

# Or run a shell script
0 18 * * 1-5 /home/user/scripts/job.sh >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1
GitHub Actions
# .github/workflows/scheduled.yml
name: Scheduled Job

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 18 * * 1-5'

jobs:
  run:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Run job
        run: echo "Running every weekday at 6pm expression (2026)"
Kubernetes CronJob
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-scheduled-job
spec:
  schedule: "0 18 * * 1-5"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: job
            image: my-image:latest
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

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Frequently asked questions

What is the cron expression for every weekday at 6pm expression (2026)?

The cron expression is 0 18 * * 1-5. Cron every weekday at 6pm expression is 0 18 * * 1-5. This 2026 guide explains weekday scheduling semantics, timezone checks, and day-end reliability.

How do I schedule a cron job to run every weekday at 6pm expression (2026) in Linux?

Open your crontab with "crontab -e" and add a new line: 0 18 * * 1-5 /path/to/your/script.sh — this schedules your script to run every weekday at 6pm expression (2026). Save and exit; the cron daemon picks up the change immediately.

What does the cron expression "0 18 * * 1-5" mean?

Cron every weekday at 6pm expression is 0 18 * * 1-5. This 2026 guide explains weekday scheduling semantics, timezone checks, and day-end reliability.

Can I use "0 18 * * 1-5" in GitHub Actions?

Yes. In your workflow YAML, set the schedule trigger: on: schedule: - cron: '0 18 * * 1-5'. GitHub Actions uses standard 5-field Unix cron syntax, so this expression works as-is.

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