Cron Expressions for Business Hours Only

Not every job needs to run 24/7. Sync jobs that hit a rate-limited third-party API, notification jobs that shouldn't wake anyone at 2 AM, or reports that are only useful during working hours all benefit from being restricted to weekdays and a specific hour range. Cron handles this cleanly by combining the hour and day-of-week fields.

The two fields that matter: hour and day-of-week

┌─ minute        (0 – 59)
│ ┌─ hour         (0 – 23)   ← restrict this for "business hours"
│ │ ┌─ day/month  (1 – 31)
│ │ │ ┌─ month    (1 – 12)
│ │ │ │ ┌─ day/week (0 – 6, 0 = Sunday) ← restrict this for "weekdays"
│ │ │ │ │
0 9-17  *  *  1-5   → every hour from 9 AM to 5 PM, Mon–Fri

Common business-hours patterns

• 0 9 * * 1-5 — once, at 9:00 AM, Monday through Friday
• 0 9-17 * * 1-5 — every hour on the hour, 9 AM to 5 PM, weekdays
• */30 9-17 * * 1-5 — every 30 minutes during business hours, weekdays
• */15 9-18 * * 1-5 — every 15 minutes, 9 AM to 6:45 PM, weekdays
• 0 9,13,17 * * 1-5 — three times a day (9 AM, 1 PM, 5 PM), weekdays only
• 0 9-17 * * 1-6 — includes Saturday as a working day (common in Indian retail/SME businesses)
• 0 10-18 * * 1-5 — a 10 AM to 6 PM shift instead of 9-to-5

Split shifts and lunch-hour exclusions

You can combine a comma-separated list with ranges to express something like "morning and afternoon shift, skip the lunch hour":

# Every 30 minutes from 9 AM–1 PM and 2 PM–6 PM, weekdays
# (skips the 1 PM–2 PM lunch hour entirely)
*/30 9-12,14-17 * * 1-5

# Reads as: hour field = 9,10,11,12,14,15,16,17

Common mistakes with business-hours expressions

• Off-by-one on the end hour. 9-17 in the hour field fires at 9:00 through 17:00 (5 PM) — it does not include anything after 17:00. If you want the job to run through 5:59 PM, you need a minute-level trick or explicit values.
• Forgetting cron has no holiday calendar. 1-5 covers every Monday–Friday including public holidays. If a job must skip holidays (e.g. Diwali, Republic Day), the script itself needs to check a holiday list and exit early.
• Mixing up server timezone with "business hours." "9 AM business hours" almost always means local time for your users, not whatever timezone the server defaults to — see our timezone guide below before deploying.
• Using day-of-week 7 for Sunday. Some cron implementations accept 7 as an alias for Sunday, but it's not universal — stick with 0 for portability.

Skipping holidays inside the script

// business-hours-job.js — cron triggers this every hour, 9-5, Mon-Fri;
// the script itself decides whether to actually skip a holiday
const HOLIDAYS_2026 = ['2026-01-26', '2026-03-14', '2026-08-15', '2026-10-02'];

const today = new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10);
if (HOLIDAYS_2026.includes(today)) {
  console.log(`Skipping run — ${today} is a public holiday`);
  process.exit(0);
}

runBusinessHoursJob();

Frequently Asked Questions