Every N minutes
*/10 * * * *
Run every 10 minutes, :00, :10, :20, :30, :40, :50.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for */10 * * * * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
What */10 * * * * means
*/10 * * * * fires six times an hour on the ten-minute marks. It is the default "frequent but not aggressive" cadence, common enough that many monitoring tools and dashboards assume a ten-minute granularity for their charts.
At 144 runs a day it is gentle on rate-limited APIs and leaves comfortable headroom for a job that occasionally takes a minute or two. If your work is bursty, ten minutes is often the point where a single cron beats a tighter schedule plus a lock file.
Field-by-field breakdown
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */10 | every 10 (step) across minute |
| Hour | * | every hour |
| Day of month | * | every day-of-month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | * | every day-of-week |
Every 10 minutes in every scheduler
The same cadence written for the seven cron dialects you are most likely to meet. Copy the line for the system you target, the field count and day-of-week numbering differ between them.
| Scheduler | Expression | Copy |
|---|---|---|
| Unix / crontab | */10 * * * * | |
| GitHub Actions | */10 * * * * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | */10 * * * * | |
| Vercel Cron | */10 * * * * | |
| Quartz | 0 */10 * * * * * | |
| Spring | 0 */10 * * * * | |
| AWS EventBridge | */10 * * * * * |
When you would use */10 * * * *
- Syncing data from a rate-limited third-party API.
- Rebuilding a search index or warming a CDN cache.
- Aggregating metrics into ten-minute buckets.
The gotcha worth knowing
If the job's typical runtime creeps above ten minutes you get silent overlap. Add a lock (flock on Linux, an advisory DB lock, or a concurrency group in CI) before you tighten or keep this cadence.
People also search for
*/10 * * * * FAQ
What does the cron expression */10 * * * * mean?
*/10 * * * * means: Run every 10 minutes, :00, :10, :20, :30, :40, :50. */10 * * * * fires six times an hour on the ten-minute marks. It is the default "frequent but not aggressive" cadence, common enough that many monitoring tools and dashboards assume a ten-minute granularity for their charts.
How do I write "every 10 minutes" in GitHub Actions?
Use */10 * * * * in the schedule's cron field. If the job's typical runtime creeps above ten minutes you get silent overlap. Add a lock (flock on Linux, an advisory DB lock, or a concurrency group in CI) before you tighten or keep this cadence.
How do I write "every 10 minutes" for AWS EventBridge?
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: */10 * * * * *. Wrap it as cron(*/10 * * * * *) in the console or CloudFormation.
What is the Quartz equivalent of */10 * * * *?
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 */10 * * * * *. Remember Quartz numbers Sunday as 1, the opposite of Unix.
Related cron patterns
More cron tools
Browse the full set of cron pattern pages, or jump to the interactive tools: the cron expression builder for designing a schedule from scratch, the cron cheat sheet for a side-by-side reference, the cron timezone translator for moving a schedule between zones and dialects, and the GitHub Actions cron picker for DST-stable CI schedules.