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Crontab cron

Crontab cron expression: once a year on January 1st

To run a Crontab job once a year on January 1st, use:

0 0 1 1 *

At 00:00 UTC, on the 1st of the month, in Jan.

Your week at a glance
fewer more runs

Upcoming runs

#LocalUTCFrom now

Copy-ready code

Why use this schedule

Annual rollovers: new-year counters, yearly archives and licence renewals.

First runs, as an example

Starting from 1 January 2027, evaluated in UTC:

#Date and time (UTC)
1Fri, 01 Jan 2027, 00:00:00
2Sat, 01 Jan 2028, 00:00:00
3Mon, 01 Jan 2029, 00:00:00
4Tue, 01 Jan 2030, 00:00:00
5Wed, 01 Jan 2031, 00:00:00
6Thu, 01 Jan 2032, 00:00:00

Once a year on January 1st in every dialect

SystemExpression
Crontab (this page)0 0 1 1 *
Quartz0 0 0 1 1 ?
Spring0 0 0 1 1 *
Kubernetes0 0 1 1 *
AWS EventBridge0 0 1 1 ? *
JenkinsH 0 1 1 *
GitHub Actions0 0 1 1 *
node-cron0 0 1 1 *
Apache Airflow0 0 1 1 *
Azure Functions0 0 0 1 1 *
Google Cloud Scheduler0 0 1 1 *

Need to translate a different expression? Use the cron converter.

Ready-to-use Crontab config

Drop this into your project. The expression is the one above.

crontab line
0 0 1 1 * /path/to/command >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1

The Crontab fields, in order: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day-of-month (1-31), month (1-12), day-of-week (0-7, 0 and 7 = Sunday).

Things to watch out for in Crontab

The common mistake with this schedule

In Quartz you can add a year field. Without it the schedule repeats every year, which is usually what you want.

Frequently asked questions

How do I run a Crontab job once a year on January 1st?

Use 0 0 1 1 *. At 00:00 UTC, on the 1st of the month, in Jan.

What is the once a year on January 1st cron expression in other systems?

Quartz: 0 0 0 1 1 ?; Spring: 0 0 0 1 1 *; Kubernetes: 0 0 1 1 *. The table on this page lists every dialect.

Which time zone does Crontab use for this schedule?

Cron runs in the server's local time zone. Check it with the date command, or put CRON_TZ=Asia/Kolkata above the line on cronie-based systems.

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