Cron yearly: the expression, explained, in Laravel

The cron expression for “yearly” is 0 0 1 1 *. This page shows what each field does, the next five times it will fire, the mistake most people make with it, and a working Laravel example you can paste.

The expression

0 0 1 1 *

Field	Value	Meaning
minute	0	exactly 0
hour	0	exactly 0
day of month	1	exactly 1
month	1	exactly 1
day of week	*	every day of week

Next five runs (UTC, from now)

2027-01-01 00:00 UTC
2028-01-01 00:00 UTC
2029-01-01 00:00 UTC
2030-01-01 00:00 UTC
2031-01-01 00:00 UTC

Mistakes people make with this schedule

A job that fires once a year is the easiest to forget. Nobody notices a missed run until the next year; monitor it so silence is an alert, not a mystery.
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

// routes/console.php
Schedule::command('reports:send')
    ->cron('0 0 1 1 *')
    ->timezone('UTC')
    ->withoutOverlapping();

Requires the scheduler itself to be started every minute: `* * * * * php artisan schedule:run`.

Questions

Does 0 0 1 1 * 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?

Yes: @yearly and @annually are aliases in most crons, but not in Vercel or GitHub Actions.