Cron weekdays at 17:00: the expression, explained, in WordPress

The expression

Next five runs (UTC, from now)

1. 2026-09-18 17:00 UTC
2. 2026-09-21 17:00 UTC
3. 2026-09-22 17:00 UTC
4. 2026-09-23 17:00 UTC
5. 2026-09-24 17:00 UTC

Mistakes people make with this schedule

• Day-of-week "1-5" is Monday to Friday, but cron knows nothing about public holidays. The job still fires at 17:00 on Christmas Day; skip holidays in the job, not in the expression.
• 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

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

0 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