What is the cron expression for every tuesday?

The cron expression for every tuesday is "0 0 * * 2". Runs once a week, at midnight every Tuesday.

What should I watch out for when running a cron job every tuesday?

"Tuesday" in cron is 2, but a wrong timezone shifts the whole run to Monday or Wednesday. 0 0 * * 2 at UTC fires Monday 4pm in PST — landing it on the wrong weekday entirely. Set CRON_TZ=America/Los_Angeles (or your server's TZ) before relying on the day-of-week. Midnight Tuesday silently skips a holiday-shifted business calendar. If "every Tuesday" really means "first business day after Monday," a Monday holiday doesn't move the run — 0 0 * * 2 fires regardless. Cron has no holiday awareness; gate the command with a calendar check like [ -f /etc/holidays/$(date +%F) ] && exit 0.

Cron expression for Every Tuesday

0 0 * * 2

Runs once a week, at midnight every Tuesday.

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 * * 2`

Sending a marketing newsletter on the weekday with historically high open rates, avoiding the Monday inbox flood
Running a weekly database optimization or VACUUM during a midweek low-traffic window away from Monday's deploy churn
Pulling a weekly vendor or API report that the provider only refreshes on Tuesdays, so polling earlier returns stale data

Use `0 0 * * 2` 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 * * 2 /path/to/your-command

Runs in the server’s local timezone — check it with timedatectl. Full field reference: crontab(5) man page.

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 * * 2"

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 * * 2"

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 * * 2. 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 every tuesday schedules

"Tuesday" in cron is 2, but a wrong timezone shifts the whole run to Monday or Wednesday. 0 0 * * 2 at UTC fires Monday 4pm in PST — landing it on the wrong weekday entirely. Set CRON_TZ=America/Los_Angeles (or your server's TZ) before relying on the day-of-week.
Midnight Tuesday silently skips a holiday-shifted business calendar. If "every Tuesday" really means "first business day after Monday," a Monday holiday doesn't move the run — 0 0 * * 2 fires regardless. Cron has no holiday awareness; gate the command with a calendar check like [ -f /etc/holidays/$(date +%F) ] && exit 0.
Tuesday-only jobs go stale undetected for a full week. Miss one run (reboot, lock left behind) and there's no retry until next Tuesday — a 7-day gap. Pair it with a heartbeat ping (curl -fsS https://hc-ping.com/) so a skipped Tuesday alerts you in hours, not days.

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 * * 2` the right schedule?

If the goal is just "once midweek" and the exact day doesn't matter, every Wednesday sits dead-center in the work week with the same one-run cadence. Pick Tuesday only when something downstream genuinely keys off that specific day.

Or use the interactive cron generator & explainer, read the complete cron syntax guide, or pick another common schedule: