Cron Expression to Run Every Day at Noon
The cron expression for noon is 0 12 * * *, which runs a job every day at 12:00 midday. Cron uses a 24-hour clock, so hour 12 is noon and hour 0 is midnight.
At 12:00pm every day.
0 12 * * *Standard 5-field crontab syntax. Day of month and day of week are OR'd when both are set.
What it does
0 12 is minute 0 of hour 12. Cron has no am/pm notation, which removes the usual confusion about whether “12am” is midnight or noon: 12 in the hour field is always midday. The remaining fields are *, so the job runs at noon on every day of every month.
Midday jobs catch the middle of the working day: a lunchtime digest of support tickets, a stock or price sync before afternoon orders, a midday health report, or pausing noisy background work while traffic peaks. Paired with a midnight run, noon gives an even twice-daily rhythm — 0 0,12 * * *.
Noon on a server running UTC isn't noon for your users. If the job sends something people read, work out their local time — noon UTC is 8am in New York during daylight saving time and 9pm in Tokyo — or set the scheduler's timezone so the run follows the clock your audience sees.
Noon is also one of the most predictable times cron offers. Daylight saving changes happen overnight in most timezones, so a midday job runs exactly once every day of the year — never skipped when the clocks go forward, never doubled when they go back. That makes 12:00 a sound choice for work that must happen once a day without fail, such as a daily billing run.
How 0 12 * * * works, field by field
| FIELD | VALUE | MEANING |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | 0 | minute 0 |
| Hour | 12 | hour 12 (noon) |
| Day of month | * | every day of the month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | * | every day of the week |
Put together, cron reads 0 12 * * * as: “At 12:00pm every day.”
To see further ahead, paste the expression into the cron calculator, which lists the next ten run times and counts how many times the schedule runs in a year.
Frequently asked questions
Is 12 noon or midnight in cron?
Noon. The hour field is a 24-hour clock from 0 to 23, so 12 is midday and 0 is midnight.
How do I run a cron job at noon on weekdays?
Restrict the day of week to Monday–Friday: 0 12 * * 1-5 runs at 12:00 on weekdays only.
How do I run a job at 12:30pm?
Use 30 12 * * *. Minute 30 of hour 12 is half past twelve in the afternoon.