Cron expression for every hour
At minute 0 of every hour
At minute 0 of every hour
Try this expression in the interactive tool:
Open in cron explainer →Next 10 scheduled runs
Common use cases
Running at the top of every hour is the most common hourly schedule. The leading 0 in the minute field means it fires at :00 — which matters for logs, reports, and any output that humans will read with an expectation of clean hourly timestamps.
Hourly jobs are a natural fit for tasks that need regular attention but aren't time-critical: shipping logs to a centralised service, generating hourly analytics snapshots, refreshing CDN caches, checking SSL certificate expiry, or syncing configuration from a central store.
Many external APIs have rate limits expressed in calls-per-hour. An hourly cron job that makes one well-structured API call per cycle is often the safest way to stay within limits while keeping data fresh.
Platform-specific syntax
0 * * * * /path/to/script.shrate(1 hour)schedule:
- cron: '0 * * * *'schedule: "0 * * * *"Technical breakdown
The expression 0 * * * * has five fields: minute=0, hour=*, day (month)=*, month=*, day (week)=*. At minute 0 of every hour.