What is the cron expression for every 5 minutes?

The cron expression for every 5 minutes is */5 * * * *. The */5 step in the minute field fires at 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 55.

Can GitHub Actions run every 5 minutes?

Yes, every 5 minutes is the shortest interval GitHub Actions supports for cron schedules. Use schedule: cron: "*/5 * * * *" in your workflow YAML.

How many times does a cron job run per day at every 5 minutes?

It runs 288 times per day (12 times per hour × 24 hours).

Cron Every 5 Minutes

*/5 * * * *

Every 5 minutes

Next 10 Executions

Times shown in UTC

Mon, May 18, 202608:10
Mon, May 18, 202608:15
Mon, May 18, 202608:20
Mon, May 18, 202608:25
Mon, May 18, 202608:30
Mon, May 18, 202608:35
Mon, May 18, 202608:40
Mon, May 18, 202608:45
Mon, May 18, 202608:50
Mon, May 18, 202608:55

Field Breakdown

*/5

Minute

Every 5 minutes

*

Hour

Every hour

*

Day of Month

Every day

*

Month

Every month

*

Day of Week

Every day of week

About This Schedule

The cron expression */5 * * * * is one of the most widely used cron schedules. It runs a job every 5 minutes — at :00, :05, :10, :15, :20, :25, :30, :35, :40, :45, :50, and :55 each hour, for a total of 288 executions per day.

Every 5 minutes is the sweet spot for many use cases: monitoring and alerting, data pipeline ingestion, cache warming, sending queued emails, and syncing data between services. It's frequent enough to feel near-real-time while being gentle on system resources.

This is also the minimum interval supported by GitHub Actions cron schedules. If you need something more frequent in GitHub Actions, you'll need to use a different scheduling mechanism.