Cron Expression for First Day of Every Month

0 0 1 * *

At 12:00 AM, on day 1 of the month. Monthly invoices, usage resets, and archiving the previous month of logs.

Field-by-field breakdown

Field	Value	Allowed range	Meaning
Minute	0	0–59	at minute 0
Hour	0	0–23	at hour 0
Day of month	1	1–31	on day 1
Month	*	1–12	every month
Day of week	*	0–6 (Sunday = 0)	every day of the week

Next 5 runs (your time zone)

Calculating upcoming runs…

Cron uses the time zone of the machine or scheduler that runs it, which is often UTC on servers.

How to use this schedule

crontab

0 0 1 * * /path/to/script.sh >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1

Kubernetes CronJob

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-job
spec:
  schedule: "0 0 1 * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: my-job
              image: busybox
              command: ["sh", "-c", "echo running"]
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 1 * *'  # UTC

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the cron expression for first day of every month?

Use "0 0 1 * *". In plain English: At 12:00 AM, on day 1 of the month.

What does "0 0 1 * *" mean?

Minute: at minute 0; Hour: at hour 0; Day of month: on day 1; Month: every month; Day of week: every day of the week.