0 3 * * *
Cron reads this as: at 03:00.
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 best default for a nightly job. It is past the midnight contention, past the daylight saving transition window, and still leaves several hours before the working day for a long-running job to finish or for someone to react to a failure.
What to watch out for
Little to watch for in the schedule itself, which is the point. The remaining questions are operational: is the job idempotent if it has to be re-run, does its output go somewhere you will actually look, and will you find out if it stops running altogether? A nightly job that silently stopped three weeks ago is the most common cron failure there is, and no schedule prevents it.
The crontab line
0 3 * * * /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 |
|---|---|
0 3 * * 1-5 | 03:00 on weekdays only |
0 3 * * 0 | 03:00 on Sundays only |
30 3 * * * | 03:30 daily |
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.