Every weekday cron: what 0 9 * * 1-5 means and how to skip weekends

Field by field

Minute 0, hour 9 and a day-of-week range 1-5. Cron numbers weekdays from Sunday: 0 is Sunday, 1 is Monday through 6 Saturday, and most implementations also accept 7 for Sunday. Names work too, so 0 9 * * MON-FRI is the same schedule and easier to read in review.

The parser on this page reads it as: At 09:00, on Monday through Friday. The next run times in the panel above are computed in your browser, in your own timezone, so they are not printed in this text.

The day-of-month trap

Leave the day-of-month field as * here. When both day of month and day of week are restricted, Vixie-derived crons run the job if either matches, not when both do. So 0 9 1-7 * 1 does not mean the first Monday of the month; it means every day from the 1st to the 7th and every Monday. The first-Monday idiom needs a guard in the command, such as [ "$(date +\%d)" -le 7 ] && before it.

Example, holidays and timezones

0 9 * * 1-5 /opt/reports/bin/daily-kpis --email team@example.com is a typical business-hours job. Cron knows nothing about public holidays; if the job should skip them, have the script check a holiday list and exit early.

Weekday schedules are where the server timezone bites hardest, because the hour and the day both depend on it. 09:00 UTC on Monday is already 14:30 in India and still 05:00 or 04:00 in New York. If the job is meant for a local morning, set CRON_TZ, the Kubernetes timeZone field or the zone suffix on a systemd timer rather than doing the conversion in your head; a conversion that crosses midnight also shifts the weekday range.

systemd, Kubernetes and GitHub Actions

systemd: OnCalendar=Mon..Fri *-*-* 09:00:00. Kubernetes: schedule: "0 9 * * 1-5", with concurrencyPolicy: Forbid if a run might overlap. GitHub Actions runs 0 9 * * 1-5 at 09:00 UTC, Monday to Friday UTC. For a single day see every Monday; for weekends only, use 0 9 * * 0,6.