BackendBench
Coffee

Home โ€บ Spring โ€บ On the first day of every quarter

Spring cron

Spring cron expression: on the first day of every quarter

To run a Spring job on the first day of every quarter, use:

0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *

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

Your week at a glance
fewer more runs

Upcoming runs

#LocalUTCFrom now

Copy-ready code

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.

First runs, as an example

Starting from 1 January 2027, evaluated in UTC:

#Date and time (UTC)
1Fri, 01 Jan 2027, 00:00:00
2Thu, 01 Apr 2027, 00:00:00
3Thu, 01 Jul 2027, 00:00:00
4Fri, 01 Oct 2027, 00:00:00
5Sat, 01 Jan 2028, 00:00:00
6Sat, 01 Apr 2028, 00:00:00

On the first day of every quarter in every dialect

SystemExpression
Spring (this page)0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
Quartz0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 ?
Crontab0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
Kubernetes0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
AWS EventBridge0 0 1 1,4,7,10 ? *
JenkinsH 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
GitHub Actions0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
node-cron0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
Apache Airflow0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
Azure Functions0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
Google Cloud Scheduler0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *

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

Ready-to-use Spring config

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

Spring @Scheduled
@Scheduled(cron = "0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *", zone = "UTC")
public void runJob() {
    // ...
}
application.properties
app.job.cron=0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *
# @Scheduled(cron = "${app.job.cron}")

The Spring 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 Spring

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.

Frequently asked questions

How do I run a Spring job on the first day of every quarter?

Use 0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *. At 00:00 UTC, on the 1st of the month, in Jan, Apr, Jul and Oct.

What is the on the first day of every quarter cron expression in other systems?

Quartz: 0 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 ?; Crontab: 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *; Kubernetes: 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *. The table on this page lists every dialect.

Which time zone does Spring use for this schedule?

Spring evaluates in the server time zone by default. Add zone = "UTC" (or any ZoneId) to @Scheduled to make it explicit.

Similar Spring schedules

More tools you might need