Cron Expression for Every 2 Minutes
To run a cron job every 2 minutes, use */2 * * * *. It fires on the even minutes — :00, :02, :04 and so on up to :58 — which is 30 runs an hour and 720 a day.
Every 2 minutes.
*/2 * * * *Standard 5-field crontab syntax. Day of month and day of week are OR'd when both are set.
What it does
The step /2 in the minute field takes every second value of the range 0–59, starting from 0, so the schedule lands on even minutes only. Because 2 divides 60 evenly, the gap is exactly two minutes everywhere, including across the hour: :58 is followed by :00 of the next hour.
Two minutes is a common compromise when every minute is more than a job needs but five minutes is too slow: polling a payment provider for pending transactions, refreshing a live status page, retrying messages that failed to send, or syncing a small table between two systems. It halves the load of a minute-level job while keeping delays short enough that most people won't notice them.
To run on odd minutes instead — :01, :03 … :59 — give the step a starting point: 1-59/2 * * * *. Splitting two similar jobs this way, one on even minutes and one on odd, stops them competing for the same database or API at the same moment.
How */2 * * * * works, field by field
| FIELD | VALUE | MEANING |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */2 | every 2 minutes (0, 2, 4 … 58) |
| Hour | * | every hour |
| Day of month | * | every day of the month |
| Month | * | every month |
| Day of week | * | every day of the week |
Put together, cron reads */2 * * * * as: “Every 2 minutes.”
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
What minutes does */2 * * * * run on?
Every even minute: 0, 2, 4 and so on up to 58, in every hour. That's 30 runs an hour and 720 a day.
How do I run a cron job every 2 minutes during working hours only?
Restrict the hour and day of week fields: */2 9-17 * * 1-5 runs every two minutes from 9:00 to 17:58, Monday to Friday.
Can a slow job overlap with the next 2-minute run?
Yes — cron starts the next run after two minutes whether or not the last one has finished. Wrap the command in flock -n with a lock file so a new run exits while the previous one is still going.