Cron expression for twice a day

ExamplesPlanner

The cron expression to run a job twice a day is 0 0,12 * * *, at midnight and noon. Swap in any two hours, then check both run times in your own timezone.

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Schedule summary

At 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM, every day
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About 0 0,12 * * *

0 0,12 * * * lists two hours separated by a comma, so the job runs at midnight and again at noon. Any pair works the same way — 0 6,18 * * * runs at 6 AM and 6 PM — while 0 */12 * * * is shorthand for the midnight-and-noon pair only.

Cron reads the five fields as minute hour day month weekday. For this schedule that breaks down as:

FieldPositionMatches
0minute0
0,12hour0, 12
*day of monthevery day
*monthevery month
*day of weekevery day of the week

New to cron? Read the syntax reference or the FAQ.

Use it in crontab or GitHub Actions

The snippets below use UTC. The crontab timezone setting requires a compatible daemon such as Cronie. GitHub Actions defaults to UTC and accepts a timezone on each schedule. For other timezones, Kubernetes, EventBridge Scheduler, or Vercel, use the export menu in the calculator above.

crontab

# At 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM, every day
# CRON_TZ requires a cron implementation that supports it, such as Cronie.
CRON_TZ=UTC
0 0,12 * * * /path/to/command

GitHub Actions workflow

# At 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM, every day
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0,12 * * *'
      timezone: "UTC"

Daily schedules

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