Yearly
0 0 1 1 *
Run once a year, midnight on January 1st.
This preview is live: the table below shows the actual next run times for 0 0 1 1 * in your time zone, recomputed in your browser. Change the expression, dialect, or zone to experiment, then copy the result.
What 0 0 1 1 * means
0 0 1 1 * is the canonical yearly job, midnight on the 1st of the 1st month, the value @yearly and @annually expand to. Both the day-of-month and month fields are pinned (1 and 1), so it fires exactly once per year at the calendar rollover.
Annual jobs do the work that recurs on the year boundary: resetting yearly counters, archiving the prior year, generating year-end reports, and flipping anything keyed to the calendar year. Because they run so rarely, a bug in a yearly job can lurk for twelve months before anyone notices.
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 | 1 | day-of-month = 1 |
| Month | 1 | month = 1 |
| Day of week | * | every day-of-week |
Every year on January 1st 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 1 1 * | |
| GitHub Actions | 0 0 1 1 * | |
| Kubernetes CronJob | 0 0 1 1 * | |
| Vercel Cron | 0 0 1 1 * | |
| Quartz | 0 0 0 1 1 ? * | |
| Spring | 0 0 0 1 1 ? | |
| AWS EventBridge | 0 0 1 1 ? * |
Dialect note: @yearly and @annually both equal 0 0 1 1 * on Unix/Vercel. EventBridge needs the ? and year fields: 0 0 1 1 ? *.
When you would use 0 0 1 1 *
- Year-end archival and reporting.
- Resetting annual quotas, sequence numbers, or fiscal counters.
- Anniversary or renewal automation tied to the calendar year.
The gotcha worth knowing
Yearly jobs are the hardest to test because they run once. Always make them idempotent and add a manual "run now" path so you can verify them without waiting for January, and so you can re-run if the one annual fire fails.
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0 0 1 1 * FAQ
What does the cron expression 0 0 1 1 * mean?
0 0 1 1 * means: Run once a year, midnight on January 1st. 0 0 1 1 * is the canonical yearly job, midnight on the 1st of the 1st month, the value @yearly and @annually expand to. Both the day-of-month and month fields are pinned (1 and 1), so it fires exactly once per year at the calendar rollover.
How do I write "every year on january 1st" in GitHub Actions?
Use 0 0 1 1 * in the schedule's cron field. Yearly jobs are the hardest to test because they run once. Always make them idempotent and add a manual "run now" path so you can verify them without waiting for January, and so you can re-run if the one annual fire fails.
How do I write "every year on january 1st" for AWS EventBridge?
EventBridge uses six fields with a required year and a ? placeholder in one day field: 0 0 1 1 ? *. Wrap it as cron(0 0 1 1 ? *) in the console or CloudFormation.
What is the Quartz equivalent of 0 0 1 1 *?
Quartz is seconds-first with a trailing year, so the equivalent is 0 0 0 1 1 ? *. 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.