Cron Every Weekday Meaning
Cron expression 0 0 * * 1-5 means At 12:00 AM, Monday through Friday.
Cron every weekday means a job runs Monday through Friday and skips weekends. This 2026 guide explains the common expression 0 0 * * 1-5 and practical use cases.
Cron Expression
Common use cases
- Weekday-only batch processing for business apps
- Skipping weekend alerts and report generation
- Business-day settlement and reconciliation workflows
- Weekday digest delivery for support or sales teams
How to use this cron schedule
Cron every weekday usually maps to an expression with a weekday range like 1-5. A common default is `0 0 * * 1-5`, which runs at midnight Monday through Friday and skips Saturday and Sunday. If your query is cron every weekday meaning, the key idea is that weekday filtering is handled directly in the cron string, not in custom application logic. In 2026, this pattern remains a clean way to reduce unnecessary weekend compute while keeping business-day automation predictable.
You can apply the same weekday filter at different times, such as 9 AM for workday kickoff tasks or 6 PM for end-of-day summaries. The benefit is operational clarity: everyone can read the schedule and immediately understand that weekends are excluded. Confirm how your scheduler interprets weekday numbers, because most systems use 1 for Monday and 0 or 7 for Sunday. Testing next-run timestamps in staging is still essential before attaching side effects like emails, partner exports, or billing updates.
For reliable 2026 deployments, pair weekday cron jobs with lightweight observability and failure ownership. Publish completion events so downstream consumers know outputs are current, and add safe retries for transient failures. Keep each schedule narrowly scoped, then chain additional steps explicitly if needed. This avoids hidden coupling and makes incident response faster. When teams ask for "cron every weekday," document the exact expression and timezone so behavior stays stable across environments and platform migrations.
Want to customize this schedule?
Open it in the visual builder to tweak the expression interactively.
Open in BuilderNeed to monitor this cron job?
Cronhub tracks your scheduled jobs and alerts you if they fail or run late.
Platform usage examples
# Edit your crontab
crontab -e
# Add this line to run every weekday meaning
0 0 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/script.php
# Or run a shell script
0 0 * * 1-5 /home/user/scripts/job.sh >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1# .github/workflows/scheduled.yml
name: Scheduled Job
on:
schedule:
- cron: '0 0 * * 1-5'
jobs:
run:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Run job
run: echo "Running every weekday meaning"apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: my-scheduled-job
spec:
schedule: "0 0 * * 1-5"
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: job
image: my-image:latest
restartPolicy: OnFailureRelated developer tools
More free tools for engineering workflows that pair with scheduled jobs:
Frequently asked questions
What is the cron expression for every weekday meaning?
The cron expression is 0 0 * * 1-5. Cron every weekday means a job runs Monday through Friday and skips weekends. This 2026 guide explains the common expression 0 0 * * 1-5 and practical use cases.
How do I schedule a cron job to run every weekday meaning in Linux?
Open your crontab with "crontab -e" and add a new line: 0 0 * * 1-5 /path/to/your/script.sh — this schedules your script to run every weekday meaning. Save and exit; the cron daemon picks up the change immediately.
What does the cron expression "0 0 * * 1-5" mean?
Cron every weekday means a job runs Monday through Friday and skips weekends. This 2026 guide explains the common expression 0 0 * * 1-5 and practical use cases.
Can I use "0 0 * * 1-5" in GitHub Actions?
Yes. In your workflow YAML, set the schedule trigger: on: schedule: - cron: '0 0 * * 1-5'. GitHub Actions uses standard 5-field Unix cron syntax, so this expression works as-is.