Cron expression: every day at 00:00

Q: What is the cron expression to run a job every day at 00:00?

0 0 * * * — Runs once a day at 00:00 (12:00 AM) server time.

0 0 * * *

Runs once a day at 00:00 (12:00 AM) server time.

What each field means

Field	Value	Meaning
minute	`0`	minute 0
hour	`0`	hour 0
day of month	`*`	every day of month
month	`*`	every month
day of week	`*`	every day of week

Next runs

Starting from 1 January 2026, 00:00 UTC:

Thursday 1 Jan 00:00
Friday 2 Jan 00:00
Saturday 3 Jan 00:00
Sunday 4 Jan 00:00
Monday 5 Jan 00:00
Tuesday 6 Jan 00:00

Things to watch

Remember this is the server's local time zone, not the user's. Run the server in UTC and convert for display if the exact wall-clock time matters to people.

Midnight is the most contended slot on the internet. Log rotation, backups, billing rollovers and a large share of every crontab fire at 00:00, so a job here competes for disk and database with everything else on the machine. It is also the instant the date changes: a job that stamps "today" at 00:00 can disagree with one that started at 23:59, and anything computing "yesterday" is one time-zone conversion away from the wrong day. Unless the job genuinely belongs on the date boundary, a few minutes later is strictly better.

Assuming the server runs UTC, a job firing at this hour lands on the middle of the working day in Tokyo, Sydney; outside working hours but waking or winding down in New York, Singapore; the middle of the night in London, Berlin, Mumbai. That matters less for the machine than for the people: whoever is on call when this breaks is determined by this row, not by the schedule.

If the server runs UTC, this is
New York	19:00 (previous day)
London	00:00
Berlin	01:00
Mumbai	05:30
Singapore	08:00
Tokyo	09:00
Sydney	11:00

The same schedule elsewhere

# crontab
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/my-job >> /var/log/my-job.log 2>&1

# GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/job.yml) — always UTC
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 * * *'

# Kubernetes CronJob
spec:
  schedule: "0 0 * * *"

# AWS EventBridge — six fields, and ? in one of the day fields
cron(0 0 * * ? *)

Frequently asked questions

What is the cron expression to run a job every day at 00:00?

0 0 * * * — Runs once a day at 00:00 (12:00 AM) server time.

Which time zone does cron use?

The server's local time zone, unless the scheduler says otherwise. GitHub Actions always uses UTC. Kubernetes CronJobs use UTC unless you set spec.timeZone. Running servers in UTC and converting only for display avoids an entire class of daylight-saving bugs.

What happens if the previous run is still going?

Standard cron starts a new one regardless, so long-running jobs can pile up. Wrap the command in flock -n /var/lock/my-job.lock, or set concurrencyPolicy: Forbid on a Kubernetes CronJob.

Why did my cron job not run at all?

The three usual causes: the script is not executable, the command relies on a PATH or environment variable that cron does not set, or output went nowhere because no mail transport is configured. Redirect stdout and stderr to a log file and the reason usually becomes obvious.

Other schedules

Build a custom cron expression →