Cron expression for Every weekend at 9am
0 9 * * 6,0
Runs at 09:00 on Saturday and Sunday.
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 9 * * 6,0
- Heavy reprocessing while weekday traffic is away — re-encodes, re-indexes, backfills
- Personal-infra chores: photo backups, NAS scrub, dotfile sync
- Weekend-promo sends for consumer products
Use 0 9 * * 6,0 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 9 * * 6,0 /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 9 * * 6,0"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 9 * * 6,0"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 9 * * 6,0. 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 weekend at 9am schedules
- Sunday is
0everywhere;7also works in Vixie cron but not in every implementation —6,0is the portable spelling of “weekend”. - Whose weekend? Much of the Middle East runs Fri–Sat. Hardcoding
6,0bakes one culture’s weekend into the schedule — fine for your own infra, risky for user-facing sends.
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 9 * * 6,0 the right schedule?
Once a week is enough for most maintenance — Sunday at midnight picks the quietest single slot. The inverse window (business hours) is weekdays at 9am.
Or use the interactive cron generator & explainer, read the complete cron syntax guide, or pick another common schedule: