Cron expression for First of every month
0 0 1 * *
Runs at 00:00 on the first day of every month.
Next 5 runs (your local time)
These are shown in your browser’s timezone. The job itself runs in the scheduler’s timezone — often UTC — so the real run time can differ.
What people actually schedule with 0 0 1 * *
- Monthly billing runs and invoice generation
- Archiving last month’s logs to cold storage
- Resetting monthly usage counters and quotas
Use 0 0 1 * * on your platform
It’s the same 5-field expression everywhere — what changes is where you put it and which timezone it runs in.
Linux / crontab
0 0 1 * * /path/to/your-commandRuns in the server’s local timezone — check it with timedatectl.
Full field reference: crontab(5) man page.
GitHub Actions
on:
schedule:
- cron: "0 0 1 * *"GitHub Actions always runs scheduled jobs in UTC — there is no timezone setting, and runs can be delayed under load (official docs).
Kubernetes CronJob
spec:
schedule: "0 0 1 * *"Defaults to UTC. Set spec.timeZone (Kubernetes 1.27+)
for a specific zone — see the
CronJob docs.
Quartz / Spring @Scheduled
Quartz uses 6 fields (seconds first): 0 0 0 1 * *. Watch out:
Quartz day-of-week is 1=SUN … 7=SAT (not 0–6), and day-of-month /
day-of-week use ? — double-check if your schedule touches those fields
(Quartz cron reference).
Gotchas with first of every month schedules
- Standard cron has no “last day of month”. The portable trick is a daily job that checks whether tomorrow is the 1st:
0 23 28-31 * * [ "$(date -d tomorrow +\%d)" = "01" ] && run. - At 00:00 on the 1st, month-boundary data is still arriving — late webhooks, queued events, replication lag. Real billing jobs run at 03:00 on the 1st, or on the 2nd, and you should too.
- Anything scheduled on day 29–31 silently skips short months — February eats your day-30 job four times a decade (well, twelve times, but who’s counting). Day 1 is the only always-safe monthly anchor besides 28.
Will you know if this job silently fails?
Cron jobs fail quietly — a server reboots, a path changes, or an error code is ignored — and nobody notices until the data is missing. A cron monitor (a dead-man’s-switch) alerts you when a scheduled job does not check in on time.
Monitor your cron jobs with UptimeRobot →
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Is 0 0 1 * * the right schedule?
Quarterly closes: every quarter. If “monthly” secretly means “regularly-ish”, weekly on Sunday night is easier to reason about and to monitor.
Or use the interactive cron generator & explainer, read the complete cron syntax guide, or pick another common schedule: