*/5 * * * *
Cron reads this as: every 5th minute.
Next 5 runs
Computed in your browser's local time zone. Cron itself evaluates against the server's zone, which on most cloud hosts is UTC — see time zones & DST if that distinction matters here.
- Calculating…
When to use this schedule
The default polling interval for most of the industry, and for good reason: 5 divides 60 evenly, twelve runs an hour is cheap, and a five-minute worst-case detection window is acceptable for most monitoring and sync work. It fires at :00, :05, :10 and so on.
What to watch out for
Everyone picks this interval and everyone starts it at :00, so on a shared host or against a shared API you are competing with every other five-minute job on the fleet. If you are calling a rate-limited service, 1-56/5 * * * * shifts your runs off the crowd by a minute at no cost. Otherwise the main risk is the usual one: a job that sometimes runs longer than five minutes and quietly stacks up.
The crontab line
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/your-job.sh >> /var/log/your-job.log 2>&1Redirect the output somewhere you will actually read it — by default cron mails it, and on a host with no mail transport that means it is discarded. 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
Need something this page does not cover? 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 collects sixty schedules in one place, and the guides cover crontab syntax, time zones, troubleshooting and production practices.