Last day of the month in cron

Five-field cron cannot express "last day of the month" because month lengths differ. The standard workaround schedules the job on every possible last day and lets the command test the date:

0 0 28-31 * * [ "$(date -d tomorrow +\%d)" = "01" ] && /path/to/job

The percent sign must be escaped as \% inside a crontab, because an unescaped % is treated as a newline. On macOS and BSD, date -d is not available; use date -v+1d +%d instead. Schedulers with an extended syntax (Quartz, Jenkins, some cloud schedulers) support L in the day-of-month field, which means "last".

Field by field

Next run times

Computed in your browser from the current time, so you can check the schedule against a clock you trust.

Variations

• 0 0 1 * *first day of the month, often a simpler alternative · see page
• 0 23 28-31 * *the same guard, late evening · try it
• 0 0 L * *Quartz / extended syntax only · try it

Where this expression works

• Linux and macOS crontab: as written; times follow the system timezone.
• Kubernetes CronJob: the same five fields; UTC unless spec.timeZone is set.
• GitHub Actions: the same syntax in UTC, minimum interval five minutes, no @ shortcuts.
• AWS EventBridge: a different six-field syntax; do not paste this expression unchanged.

Full platform comparison · Cron tutorial

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