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At 00:00 UTC, on the 1st of the month, in Jan, Apr, Jul and Oct.

Why use this schedule

January, April, July and October: quarterly reporting and reviews. Finance and compliance teams in particular run on this rhythm, so these jobs tend to be important and rarely run.

• Quarterly business reviews
• Quarterly access recertification
• Quarterly invoices

First runs, as an example

Starting from 1 January 2027, evaluated in UTC:

On the first day of every quarter in every dialect

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

Ready-to-use node-cron config

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

import cron from 'node-cron';

cron.schedule('0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *', () => {
  console.log('running a task');
}, { timezone: 'UTC' });

The node-cron fields, in order: second (0-59), 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 node-cron

• Unlike Unix cron, node-cron requires day-of-month and day-of-week to both match. Leave one of them as * unless you want the intersection.
• Five fields: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week. Add a leading seconds field for sub-minute schedules.
• node-cron uses the server time zone unless you pass { timezone: "Asia/Kolkata" }. Its documentation advises timezone: "UTC" for jobs that must not skip or repeat when clocks change.

The common mistake with this schedule

There is no */3 shortcut that starts in January. */3 in the month field gives 1,4,7,10 in Unix cron, but an explicit list is clearer and safer across dialects.

Similar node-cron schedules