Cron expression for Every weekday

What people actually schedule with 0 0 * * 1-5

• Sending a daily standup digest or task summary to a team channel only on working days, so nobody gets a Saturday ping at midnight
• Generating SLA or support-queue reports that should only accumulate business days, since weekend volume is near zero and skews the numbers
• Running a nightly batch import from a partner system that only updates their feed on business days, so weekend runs would just reprocess stale data

Use 0 0 * * 1-5 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 * * 1-5 /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 * * 1-5"

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 * * 1-5"

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 * * 1-5. 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 weekday schedules

• This fires at 00:00, which is the wrong end of the workday for most "weekday" jobs. People read "every weekday" as "during business hours" but 0 0 * * 1-5 runs at the start of Monday, hours before anyone is online. If you want end-of-day output, you want 0 17 * * 1-5 instead.
• Day-of-week is evaluated in the server's timezone, not the team's. A box on UTC fires this at Sunday 4pm / Monday 7am for a US-Pacific team — so your "Monday" job already ran while it was still Sunday locally, and Friday's may slip into Saturday. Pin the cron's TZ= or convert the hour before you trust the weekday boundary.
• It does not know about public holidays. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and bank holidays are still Mon–Fri to cron, so a "business-day-only" report will happily run and email an empty or misleading dataset. Gate the command with a holiday-calendar check (e.g. exit early if date +%F is in a holiday file).

Is 0 0 * * 1-5 the right schedule?

If your job is really about end-of-business actions, skip midnight and use every weekday at 5pm. If you don't actually care about skipping weekends, every day at midnight is simpler and you lose nothing.

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

• Every weekday at 5pm 0 17 * * 1-5
• Every weekday at 6pm 0 18 * * 1-5
• Every Monday 0 0 * * 1
• Every Tuesday 0 0 * * 2
• Every Wednesday 0 0 * * 3
• Every Thursday 0 0 * * 4