Cron: Daily at midnight (0 0 * * *)
Plain-English meaning, run times, and visual editor for the 0 0 * * * cron schedule. No sign-up required.
What does 0 0 * * * mean?
The cron expression 0 0 * * * translates to “At 00:00”. It is one of the most commonly used schedules (daily at midnight).
Minute 0 and hour 0, with the day, month and weekday all wildcards, pins the job to exactly one moment a day: 00:00, midnight. This is the archetypal daily job - nightly backups, end-of-day rollups, cleanup of expired records, generating the previous day's report. Midnight is popular precisely because traffic is usually lowest then. One catch worth flagging: that midnight is midnight in the server's time zone (UTC on most cloud hosts), so a "daily at midnight" job can run in the middle of your afternoon unless you account for the offset.
Use the builder above to tweak this expression and instantly see how the description and the next run times change.
Example runs from Jan 1, 2026 (UTC)
- Fri Jan 02 2026, 00:00 UTC
- Sat Jan 03 2026, 00:00 UTC
- Sun Jan 04 2026, 00:00 UTC
- Mon Jan 05 2026, 00:00 UTC
- Tue Jan 06 2026, 00:00 UTC
Frequently Asked Questions
About cron expressions and this generator.
It is "0 0 * * *", which specifies minute 0 and hour 0 of every day.
It uses the system timezone of your server. If your server is configured to UTC, midnight will be 00:00 UTC.
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