Cron weekdays at 06:30: the expression, explained, in WordPress

The cron expression for “weekdays at 06:30” is 30 6 * * 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

30 6 * * 1-5
FieldValueMeaning
minute30exactly 30
hour6exactly 6
day of month*every day of month
month*every month
day of week1-5Monday to Friday

Next five runs (UTC, from now)

  1. 2026-09-18 06:30 UTC
  2. 2026-09-21 06:30 UTC
  3. 2026-09-22 06:30 UTC
  4. 2026-09-23 06:30 UTC
  5. 2026-09-24 06:30 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 06:30 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);

30 6 * * 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 30 6 * * 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.