Every N minutes
* * * * *
Run once every minute, all day, every day.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for * * * * * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
What * * * * * means
* * * * * is the tightest legal Unix cron cadence: a single asterisk in every field means "every value", so the job fires at the top of every minute, 1,440 times a day. It is the schedule people reach for first when they want something to feel real-time, and the one they most often regret picking in production.
A wildcard minute is fine for a quick health probe or a development watcher, but on a busy host it can stack: if a run occasionally takes longer than 60 seconds, the scheduler will start the next copy before the last one finishes. Most teams that think they want "every minute" actually want "every 5 minutes" plus a lock file, or an event-driven trigger instead of polling.
Field-by-field breakdown
Unix cron has five fields. Here is what each one is doing in this expression:
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | * | every minute |
| Hour | * | every hour |
| Day of month | * | every day-of-month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | * | every day-of-week |
Every minute 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 | * * * * * | |
| GitHub Actions | * * * * * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | * * * * * | |
| Vercel Cron | * * * * * | |
| Quartz | 0 * * * * * * | |
| Spring | 0 * * * * * | |
| AWS EventBridge | * * * * * * |
Dialect note: Quartz needs the seconds field, so * * * * * becomes 0 * * * * ?. Without the leading 0, Quartz would fire every second.
When you would use * * * * *
- Liveness/heartbeat probes that must detect an outage within ~60 seconds.
- Local development file watchers and quick smoke checks.
- Draining a small in-process queue when you have no message broker.
The gotcha worth knowing
On GitHub Actions a one-minute schedule is accepted but ignored, shared runners enforce a five-minute floor, so the job realistically fires every 5-10 minutes, never every minute.
People also search for
* * * * * FAQ
What does the cron expression * * * * * mean?
* * * * * means: Run once every minute, all day, every day. * * * * * is the tightest legal Unix cron cadence: a single asterisk in every field means "every value", so the job fires at the top of every minute, 1,440 times a day. It is the schedule people reach for first when they want something to feel real-time, and the one they most often regret picking in production.
How do I write "every minute" in GitHub Actions?
Use * * * * * in the schedule's cron field. On GitHub Actions a one-minute schedule is accepted but ignored, shared runners enforce a five-minute floor, so the job realistically fires every 5-10 minutes, never every minute.
How do I write "every minute" for AWS EventBridge?
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: * * * * * *. Wrap it as cron(* * * * * *) in the console or CloudFormation.
What is the Quartz equivalent of * * * * *?
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 * * * * * *. 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.