Every N minutes
*/5 * * * *
Run every 5 minutes, :00, :05, :10, … :55.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for */5 * * * * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
What */5 * * * * means
*/5 * * * * is the single most-searched cron expression on the internet, and for good reason: five minutes is the sweet spot for polling. It fires twelve times an hour on the round five-minute marks, gives you 288 runs a day, and is short enough to feel responsive but long enough that overlapping runs are unusual.
It is also the lowest cadence that GitHub Actions reliably honours, which is why so many CI pipelines settle on it. If you find yourself wanting something faster, that is usually a signal to switch from polling to an event-driven trigger (a webhook, a queue, a file-system notification) rather than tightening the cron.
Field-by-field breakdown
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */5 | every 5 (step) across minute |
| Hour | * | every hour |
| Day of month | * | every day-of-month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | * | every day-of-week |
Every 5 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 | */5 * * * * | |
| GitHub Actions | */5 * * * * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | */5 * * * * | |
| Vercel Cron | */5 * * * * | |
| Quartz | 0 */5 * * * * * | |
| Spring | 0 */5 * * * * | |
| AWS EventBridge | */5 * * * * * |
Dialect note: On Vercel and Render you can also write this as @every 5m. GitHub Actions has no alias support, so the */5 * * * * form is required there.
When you would use */5 * * * *
- Scheduled jobs on GitHub Actions, where five minutes is the practical floor.
- Polling an external API for new records on a budget.
- Cache warming, sitemap pings, and uptime checks.
The gotcha worth knowing
Five minutes is the realistic minimum on GitHub Actions shared runners. */1 through */4 are accepted syntactically but queue unpredictably; pin to */5 if punctuality matters.
People also search for
*/5 * * * * FAQ
What does the cron expression */5 * * * * mean?
*/5 * * * * means: Run every 5 minutes, :00, :05, :10, … :55. */5 * * * * is the single most-searched cron expression on the internet, and for good reason: five minutes is the sweet spot for polling. It fires twelve times an hour on the round five-minute marks, gives you 288 runs a day, and is short enough to feel responsive but long enough that overlapping runs are unusual.
How do I write "every 5 minutes" in GitHub Actions?
Use */5 * * * * in the schedule's cron field. Five minutes is the realistic minimum on GitHub Actions shared runners. */1 through */4 are accepted syntactically but queue unpredictably; pin to */5 if punctuality matters.
How do I write "every 5 minutes" for AWS EventBridge?
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: */5 * * * * *. Wrap it as cron(*/5 * * * * *) in the console or CloudFormation.
What is the Quartz equivalent of */5 * * * *?
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 */5 * * * * *. 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.