Weekly
0 0 * * 6
Run once a week, Saturday at 00:00.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for 0 0 * * 6 in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
What 0 0 * * 6 means
0 0 * * 6 fires at the start of Saturday, day-of-week 6 in Unix. The weekend is the most popular window for disruptive maintenance, because production traffic on many business systems is at its lowest, so jobs that need an exclusive lock or a long quiet window run here.
Saturday-midnight is the front edge of that window: schema migrations, full-table rewrites, large data migrations, and anything you would never dare run during the week.
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 | 0 | hour = 0 |
| Day of month | * | every day-of-month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | 6 | day-of-week = 6 |
Every Saturday at midnight 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 0 * * 6 | |
| GitHub Actions | 0 0 * * 6 | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | 0 0 * * 6 | |
| Vercel Cron | 0 0 * * 6 | |
| Quartz | 0 0 0 ? * 6 * | |
| Spring | 0 0 0 ? * 6 | |
| AWS EventBridge | 0 0 ? * 6 * |
When you would use 0 0 * * 6
- Weekend maintenance windows and schema migrations.
- Full backups or archive jobs that need a long quiet period.
- Weekly heavy recompute that would disrupt weekday traffic.
The gotcha worth knowing
Saturday is 6 and Sunday is 0 in Unix, but * * * * 6,0 (or 6,7) is the idiomatic "weekend" set. Writing * * * * 0-6 covers the whole week, not just the weekend.
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0 0 * * 6 FAQ
What does the cron expression 0 0 * * 6 mean?
0 0 * * 6 means: Run once a week, Saturday at 00:00. 0 0 * * 6 fires at the start of Saturday, day-of-week 6 in Unix. The weekend is the most popular window for disruptive maintenance, because production traffic on many business systems is at its lowest, so jobs that need an exclusive lock or a long quiet window run here.
How do I write "every saturday at midnight" in GitHub Actions?
Use 0 0 * * 6 in the schedule's cron field. Saturday is 6 and Sunday is 0 in Unix, but * * * * 6,0 (or 6,7) is the idiomatic "weekend" set. Writing * * * * 0-6 covers the whole week, not just the weekend.
How do I write "every saturday at midnight" for AWS EventBridge?
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: 0 0 ? * 6 *. Wrap it as cron(0 0 ? * 6 *) in the console or CloudFormation.
What is the Quartz equivalent of 0 0 * * 6?
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 0 0 ? * 6 *. 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.