Run a cron job every 5 minutes

Fires at minutes 00, 05, 10, 15, ... 55 of every hour. The default sweet spot for most monitoring and polling jobs — frequent enough to be responsive, infrequent enough to not flood logs.

beginner POSIX / Jenkins / Quartz / AWS

*/5 * * * *

run a cron job every 5 minutes.

Next 5 fire times

Computed live in your local timezone. The cron expression itself is timezone-agnostic — these times reflect your browser clock.

computing…

Cross-system syntax variants

Same intent, different schedulers. Use this table when migrating between systems.

System	Expression	Note
Standard cron (POSIX)	/5 * * *	step value notation — works on all modern cron implementations
Jenkins	H/5 * * * *	H distributes the actual minute (e.g. fires at :02, :07, :12) so jobs don't all hit at :00
Quartz (Java)	0 0/5 * * * ?	0/5 = start at 0, step by 5
AWS EventBridge	rate(5 minutes)	exact 5-minute spacing, not minute-aligned

Common pitfalls

On free-tier hosts (Heroku, fly.io low tiers) frequent wake-ups can trip cooldown limits or cost more than expected.
If your job sometimes takes >5 minutes, overlapping instances can corrupt shared state. Always wrap with `flock` or check process count.
All 5-min jobs default to firing at :00, :05, :10 simultaneously — on shared hosts this creates load spikes. Stagger with offsets like `2-59/5`.

Use cases

API health checks against external dependencies
Cache warming for slow-to-rebuild materialized views
Polling third-party APIs that don't expose webhooks
Uptime monitor heartbeat (Pingdom, BetterStack)
Queue depth metric emission to Prometheus pushgateway

Translate any cron expression

cronwtf takes any cron string and returns plain-English description plus the next 5 fire times in your timezone. Standard 5-field, Jenkins H, Quartz 6-field — all supported.

Open cronwtf

Related cron schedules

cron every 6 hours (4×/day) · cron weekends only (saturday + sunday) · cron every year on january 1st · cron: every hour (top of hour) · ↗ polling 5-min may hit rate limits