Cron every 30 minutes during business hours

*/30 9-17 * * 1-5

Runs on the hour and half hour from 09:00 until 17:30, Monday to Friday.

What each field means

FieldPositionMeaning
*/30minuteevery 30th minute (0, 30)
9-17hour09:00–09:59 through 17:00–17:59
*day of monthevery day of month
*monthevery month
1-5day of weekMonday through Friday

Example run times

Starting from Wednesday 07 Jan 2026, 10:17, the next runs are:

  • Wed 07 Jan 2026, 10:30
  • Wed 07 Jan 2026, 11:00
  • Wed 07 Jan 2026, 11:30
  • Wed 07 Jan 2026, 12:00
  • Wed 07 Jan 2026, 12:30
  • Wed 07 Jan 2026, 13:00

How often it runs

  • 18 runs on each day it is active.
  • Active on 261 of the 365 days in 2026, for 4,698 runs that year.
  • The gap between runs varies from 30 minutes to 63 h 30 min.

Use it on your platform

Linux crontab

*/30 9-17 * * 1-5 /path/to/command

Edit with crontab -e. Cron uses the server's local time zone.

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/30 9-17 * * 1-5'

Schedules are evaluated in UTC, and runs can start late when GitHub is busy.

Kubernetes CronJob

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-job
spec:
  schedule: "*/30 9-17 * * 1-5"
  timeZone: "Etc/UTC"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: my-job
              image: busybox
              command: ["sh", "-c", "date"]
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

Without timeZone, the schedule follows the time zone of the kube-controller-manager.

AWS EventBridge

cron(0/30 9-17 ? * MON-FRI *)

AWS uses six fields (the last is the year), needs ? in either day-of-month or day-of-week, and counts weekdays from 1 = Sunday, so names like MON are safer than numbers. EventBridge rules run in UTC; EventBridge Scheduler lets you choose a time zone.

Spring @Scheduled

@Scheduled(cron = "0 */30 9-17 * * 1-5")

Spring adds a seconds field at the start, so prepend 0 to run at second zero.

Quartz

0 0/30 9-17 ? * MON-FRI

Quartz also starts with seconds and, like AWS, requires ? in one of the day fields.

Related schedules