Cron Expression 0 18 * * 1-5
Cron expression 0 18 * * 1-5 means At 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday.
Cron expression 0 18 * * 1-5 runs at 6:00 PM on weekdays (Monday to Friday). Use it for end-of-day business automations that should skip weekends.
Cron Expression
Common use cases
- Weekday end-of-day reporting and email digests
- Post-close data synchronization with BI systems
- Business-day batch exports to external partners
- Weekday-only reconciliation and compliance checks
How to use this cron schedule
Cron expression 0 18 * * 1-5 means run at minute zero, hour eighteen, on any day and month, but only on weekdays Monday through Friday. In plain English, that is 6:00 PM every business day. This is useful when your team needs daily automation after office hours without weekend runs. It is especially common for report rollups, sales data snapshots, and transactional reconciliation tasks that depend on the full business day being complete.
Compared with a simple daily cron, the weekday filter prevents unnecessary weekend processing and avoids empty or misleading weekend reports. That can reduce compute cost and alert noise in operations pipelines. For reliable execution, verify that your scheduler interprets weekday ranges exactly as expected and test around locale or platform differences. Most Unix schedulers treat 1-5 as Monday-Friday, but quick validation in staging is still worth doing before attaching side effects like partner exports or customer-facing notifications.
When implementing this schedule, define clear ownership for failure handling because weekday jobs often feed next-day planning workflows. Add retries with capped backoff, and publish completion status to Slack or your incident tool so stakeholders know whether outputs are trustworthy. If you later need Saturday support, fork this expression rather than overloading one cron with conditional logic. Keeping each schedule explicit makes debugging and handoffs easier for both engineers and operations teams.
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 expression 0 18 * * 1-5
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/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 expression 0 18 * * 1-5"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: OnFailureRelated developer tools
More free tools for engineering workflows that pair with scheduled jobs:
Frequently asked questions
What is the cron expression for expression 0 18 * * 1-5?
The cron expression is 0 18 * * 1-5. Cron expression 0 18 * * 1-5 runs at 6:00 PM on weekdays (Monday to Friday). Use it for end-of-day business automations that should skip weekends.
How do I schedule a cron job to run expression 0 18 * * 1-5 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 expression 0 18 * * 1-5. Save and exit; the cron daemon picks up the change immediately.
What does the cron expression "0 18 * * 1-5" mean?
Cron expression 0 18 * * 1-5 runs at 6:00 PM on weekdays (Monday to Friday). Use it for end-of-day business automations that should skip weekends.
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.