Cron every 5 minutes during business hours: the expression, explained, in WordPress

The cron expression for “every 5 minutes during business hours” is */5 9-17 * * 1-5. This page shows what each field does, the next five times it will fire, the mistake most people make with it, and a working WordPress example you can paste.

The expression

*/5 9-17 * * 1-5

Field	Value	Meaning
minute	*/5	every 5 minutes, starting at 0
hour	9-17	from 9 to 17
day of month	*	every day of month
month	*	every month
day of week	1-5	Monday to Friday

Next five runs (UTC, from now)

2026-09-18 09:00 UTC
2026-09-18 09:05 UTC
2026-09-18 09:10 UTC
2026-09-18 09:15 UTC
2026-09-18 09:20 UTC

Mistakes people make with this schedule

"9-17" includes the whole of hour 17, so the last run of the day is at 17:45, not 17:00, and the first is at 09:00. Use "9-16" if 17:00 must be the last.
Assuming the server clock is your clock. Cron runs in the machine’s timezone unless the runtime says otherwise; the examples here are UTC.
No lock around a job that might overlap itself, and no alert when it silently stops. That second one is what Supercrontab is for.

Run it in your stack

Linux crontab Laravel WordPress Next.js / Vercel Node.js Python Docker GitHub Actions

// WP-Cron only fires on page loads. Disable it and call wp-cron.php
// from a real scheduler instead:
// define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

*/5 9-17 * * 1-5 curl -fsS https://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron

On low-traffic sites WP-Cron drifts. An external caller makes it exact.

Questions

Does */5 9-17 * * 1-5 run in my local time?

Only if the scheduler is configured for it. crontab uses the system timezone; Vercel and GitHub Actions always use UTC; Laravel and node-cron take a timezone option. In Supercrontab the timezone is a field on the job.

What if the previous run is still going?

Classic cron starts the next run anyway. Add a lock (flock on Linux, withoutOverlapping() in Laravel) or let Supercrontab skip the tick while the previous request is open.

Is there a shorter way to write this?

No. The five-field form is the shortest portable version.