Monthly
0 17 * * 5
Run on the last Friday of every month at 17:00 (with a guard).
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
Like the last day of the month, the "last Friday" has no native Unix operator. The portable trick is to fire every Friday (0 17 * * 5) and add a guard in the job that checks whether another Friday remains this month, i.e. whether today + 7 days rolls into the next month. Only the final Friday passes the check.
Last-Friday scheduling is a fixture of team rhythms: the monthly demo, the sprint retro, the all-hands. It is deliberately tied to a weekday rather than a date so it always lands on a working day people can attend.
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 |
Last Friday of the month 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 * |
Dialect note: Quartz has a real last-weekday operator: 0 0 17 ? * 6L (6 = Friday in Quartz numbering, where Sunday = 1). EventBridge uses 0 17 ? * 6L *.
When you would use 0 17 * * 5
- Monthly demo, retro, or all-hands reminders.
- End-of-month reviews tied to a Friday.
- Last-working-Friday payroll or reporting cutoffs.
The gotcha worth knowing
The base 0 17 * * 5 fires every Friday. The "last Friday" logic lives in the job: [ "$(date -d '+7 days' +%m)" != "$(date +%m)" ] is true only on the month's final Friday. Quartz expresses it natively as 6L.
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0 17 * * 5 FAQ
What does the cron expression 0 17 * * 5 mean?
0 17 * * 5 means: Run on the last Friday of every month at 17:00 (with a guard). Like the last day of the month, the "last Friday" has no native Unix operator. The portable trick is to fire every Friday (0 17 * * 5) and add a guard in the job that checks whether another Friday remains this month, i.e. whether today + 7 days rolls into the next month. Only the final Friday passes the check.
How do I write "last friday of the month" in GitHub Actions?
Use 0 17 * * 5 in the schedule's cron field. The base 0 17 * * 5 fires every Friday. The "last Friday" logic lives in the job: [ "$(date -d '+7 days' +%m)" != "$(date +%m)" ] is true only on the month's final Friday. Quartz expresses it natively as 6L.
How do I write "last friday of the month" 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.
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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.