Weekly
0 17 * * 5
Run once a week, Friday at 17:00.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for 0 17 * * 5 in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
What 0 17 * * 5 means
0 17 * * 5 fires Friday at 5pm, the end of the working week. Friday is day-of-week 5 in Unix, and 5pm is 17 in 24-hour time. It is the standard slot for weekly wrap-up work: the end-of-week report, the sprint demo reminder, the "close out the week" cleanup.
End-of-week jobs are often deliberately scheduled to finish before people leave, so a Friday-evening summary lands while it is still actionable. Some teams pull it earlier (3-4pm) so nobody misses it on the way out the door.
Field-by-field breakdown
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | 0 | minute = 0 |
| Hour | 17 | hour = 17 |
| Day of month | * | every day-of-month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | 5 | day-of-week = 5 |
Every Friday at 5pm 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 | 0 17 * * 5 | |
| GitHub Actions | 0 17 * * 5 | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | 0 17 * * 5 | |
| Vercel Cron | 0 17 * * 5 | |
| Quartz | 0 0 17 ? * 5 * | |
| Spring | 0 0 17 ? * 5 | |
| AWS EventBridge | 0 17 ? * 5 * |
When you would use 0 17 * * 5
- End-of-week summary and retrospective prompts.
- Weekly billing or invoicing runs.
- Kicking off long jobs that can run undisturbed over the weekend.
The gotcha worth knowing
If the goal is "before everyone leaves", 5pm may be too late, many people have logged off. Consider 0 15 * * 5 (3pm) for human-facing Friday sends.
People also search for
0 17 * * 5 FAQ
What does the cron expression 0 17 * * 5 mean?
0 17 * * 5 means: Run once a week, Friday at 17:00. 0 17 * * 5 fires Friday at 5pm, the end of the working week. Friday is day-of-week 5 in Unix, and 5pm is 17 in 24-hour time. It is the standard slot for weekly wrap-up work: the end-of-week report, the sprint demo reminder, the "close out the week" cleanup.
How do I write "every friday at 5pm" in GitHub Actions?
Use 0 17 * * 5 in the schedule's cron field. If the goal is "before everyone leaves", 5pm may be too late, many people have logged off. Consider 0 15 * * 5 (3pm) for human-facing Friday sends.
How do I write "every friday at 5pm" for AWS EventBridge?
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: 0 17 ? * 5 *. Wrap it as cron(0 17 ? * 5 *) in the console or CloudFormation.
What is the Quartz equivalent of 0 17 * * 5?
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 0 17 ? * 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.