*/5 * * * *
Cron reads this as: every 5th minute.
Next 5 runs
These times are in your browser's local time zone. Cron itself uses the server's zone, which on most cloud hosts is UTC. If the difference matters here, see time zones & DST.
- Calculating…
When to use this schedule
Most teams use this as their default polling interval. 5 divides 60 evenly, twelve runs an hour cost little, and a worst-case detection delay of five minutes is acceptable for most monitoring and sync work. It fires at :00, :05, :10 and so on.
What to watch out for
Because this interval is so common and almost always starts at :00, a job on a shared host or against a shared API competes with every other five-minute job on the fleet. If you call a rate-limited service, 1-56/5 * * * * moves your runs one minute away from the crowd at no cost. Otherwise the main risk is a job that sometimes runs longer than five minutes, so that runs quietly stack up.
The crontab line
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/your-job.sh >> /var/log/your-job.log 2>&1Send the output to a log you will read. By default cron mails it, and on a host with no mail transport that mail is silently dropped. See the crontab guide for the surrounding syntax.
Related schedules
| Expression | Schedule |
|---|---|
1-56/5 * * * * | Every 5 minutes, offset by one |
*/5 * * * 1-5 | Every 5 minutes on weekdays |
*/10 * * * * | Every 10 minutes |
Build your own
If this page doesn't cover the schedule you need, compose it field by field in the visual builder, or paste an expression you already have into the explainer for a per-field breakdown. The examples library has sixty schedules in one place, and the guides cover crontab syntax, time zones, troubleshooting and production practices.