Cron every quarter

0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *

Runs at midnight on the first day of each quarter: Jan 1, Apr 1, Jul 1 and Oct 1.

What each field means

FieldPositionMeaning
0minuteonly 0
0houronly 00:00–00:59
1day of monthonly 1
1,4,7,10monthJanuary, April, July, October
*day of weekevery day of week

Example run times

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

  • Wed 01 Apr 2026, 00:00
  • Wed 01 Jul 2026, 00:00
  • Thu 01 Oct 2026, 00:00
  • Fri 01 Jan 2027, 00:00
  • Thu 01 Apr 2027, 00:00
  • Thu 01 Jul 2027, 00:00

How often it runs

  • 1 run on each day it is active.
  • Active on 4 of the 365 days in 2026, for 4 runs that year.
  • The gap between runs varies from 90 days to 92 days.

Use it on your platform

Linux crontab

0 0 1 1,4,7,10 * /path/to/command

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

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *'

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: "0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *"
  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 0 1 1,4,7,10 ? *)

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 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *")

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

Quartz

0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 ?

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

Related schedules