Every year cron: what @yearly means and whether you should rely on it

What @yearly expands to

Minute 0, hour 0, day of month 1, month 1, any day of week: 0 0 1 1 *. The month field can also be written by name, so 0 0 1 JAN * is the same schedule. @annually is an exact synonym.

This page's parser expands the macro and reads it as: At 00:00, on the 1st of the month, in January. 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.

Should a job run once a year?

Yearly cron entries exist for things like archiving the previous year's logs, rotating a long-lived key, or resetting annual counters. They are also the entries most likely to fail unnoticed: the server may have been rebuilt, the script's dependencies upgraded or the crontab dropped during a migration since the last run, and nobody will see the result until the next January.

Treat a yearly job like a manual runbook with a reminder attached. Make it idempotent and runnable by hand for a named year (/opt/ops/bin/archive-year 2025), log loudly, and have something outside the host, such as a dead-man's-switch check, alert if the run does not report in. For certificates and keys, expiry monitoring is safer than a yearly rotation job.

New Year in which timezone?

Midnight on 1 January is midnight in the cron daemon's zone. On a UTC server that is 05:30 on 1 January in India and still the evening of 31 December in the Americas, which matters if the job decides which year it is closing. Pass the year explicitly, or keep the server on UTC and make the job's notion of a year UTC as well.

Plain cron does not catch up: if the machine is off at that minute, the year's only run is lost. A systemd timer with Persistent=true, or anacron, runs it at the next boot.

systemd, Kubernetes and GitHub Actions

systemd's OnCalendar=yearly (or annually) is *-01-01 00:00:00, the same moment as cron's. Kubernetes accepts @yearly, @annually or 0 0 1 1 *. GitHub Actions requires the five-field form, cron: '0 0 1 1 *', in UTC, and a scheduled workflow in a public repository with no activity for 60 days is disabled, which a once-a-year job will certainly hit. Related macros: @monthly and @weekly.