Cron pattern
Cron Expression for Every 5 Minutes
The cron expression for runs every 5 minutes is a one-line schedule you can drop straight into your crontab — this page breaks it down field by field and shows the next five run times.
*/5 * * * * This schedule fires on the pattern shown above; see the field-by-field breakdown below.
Next 5 run times
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What does */5 * * * * mean?
In a standard 5-field cron expression, the fields are
minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. Reading
*/5 * * * * from left to right:
*/5in the minute field means “every 5 minutes” — the step syntax runs at 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 and 55.- The first
*(hour) means every hour of the day. - The second
*(day of month) means every day. - The third
*(month) means every month. - The final
*(day of week) means every day of the week.
Because nothing is restricted beyond the minute field, the job wakes up 288 times a day —
exactly 12 runs per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On some systems you will also see
*/5 * * * * written with a leading zero as 0-59/5 * * * *, which means the same thing.
Common uses for a 5-minute schedule
A five-minute cadence is one of the most popular schedules for monitoring and data pipelines.
Operations teams use */5 * * * * for lightweight health checks that poll a service
and alert when it goes down, for scraping an external API and caching the result, and for rolling
up metrics before they age out.
RDBMS users commonly pair it with REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW — running every five minutes
keeps summary tables fresh without hammering the source. It is also the sweet spot for free-tier
schedulers with a “minimum interval” limit, where you want freshness without paying for per-minute runs.
Variations worth knowing
If 5 minutes feels too eager, the same step syntax scales to any interval:
every 15 minutes is */15 * * * *.
To run only during business hours you add an hour restriction, e.g.
*/5 9-17 * * 1-5 — that is every 5 minutes between 9 AM and 5:59 PM on
weekdays only. To restrict the hour while keeping the five-minute
cadence, see the field meanings in the complete cron syntax guide.
One gotcha: cron does not branch on seconds. A five-minute schedule fires on the five-minute marks, not five minutes after the system starts, and there is no second field in the standard 5-field format.
Understanding the syntax of */5 * * * *
In plain English, this schedule every 5 minutes. Here is each of the five fields and what it controls:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */5 | every 5 minutes |
| Hour | * | every hour |
| Day of month | * | every day of the month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | * | every day of the week |
The expression has five space-separated fields: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. Any field set to * means “every”.
Explore more cron patterns
Fine-tune your schedule with a related pattern, or start from scratch in the builder.