Cron expression for every 10 minutes

*/10 * * * *

Six runs an hour, at :00, :10, :20, :30, :40 and :50.

Runs when: every 10 minutes; every hour; every day of month; every month; any day of week.

Change it in the cron expression generator

How the five fields read

Field	Value	Reads as
Minute	`*/10`	every 10 minutes
Hour	`*`	every value
Day of month	`*`	every value
Month	`*`	every value
Day of week	`*`	every value

The next five runs

What people use it for

Sending batched notification digests
Rebuilding a search index after content edits
Refreshing short-lived tokens or caches

Every job lands on the same minute

Teams pick 10 minutes and then stack several jobs on the same marks, so the database or an API gets hit by all of them at :10 and :20. Stagger them. 3-59/10 runs at :03, :13, :23 and so on, and 7,17,27,37,47,57 does the same from :07. Both are valid cron.

Variations of every 10 minutes

Expression	What it does
`3-59/10 * * * *`	Every 10 minutes, offset to :03, :13, :23 and so on.
`/10 8-18 * *`	Every 10 minutes from 08:00 to 18:50.
`/10 22-23,0-5 * *`	Every 10 minutes overnight, from 22:00 to 05:50.

The same schedule in four tools

Linux crontab

*/10 * * * * /path/to/command

Add it with crontab -e. It runs in the machine's time zone.

Kubernetes CronJob

spec:
  schedule: "*/10 * * * *"
  timeZone: "Etc/UTC"
  concurrencyPolicy: Forbid

timeZone is stable from Kubernetes 1.27. Without it, the controller's time zone applies. Forbid stops a new run starting while the last one is still going.

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/10 * * * *'

Schedules run in UTC from the default branch, and a run can start a few minutes late when GitHub is busy. Scheduled workflows in public repositories are disabled after 60 days without repository activity.

AWS EventBridge

cron(0/10 * * * ? *)

EventBridge uses six fields, with a question mark in one of the two day fields, and rules run in UTC. Weekday numbers start at Sunday = 1, so names such as MON are safer than numbers.

Questions about every 10 minutes

Why avoid running on the :00 mark?: Many systems are triggered at :00, so servers and APIs are busiest then. Moving a job a few minutes off the mark spreads the load and makes your own job less likely to be slowed down.
Is */10 the same as 0,10,20,30,40,50?: Yes, they are the same schedule.

Nearby schedules

Cron expression for every 5 minutes: Twice as often.
Cron expression for every 15 minutes: Four runs an hour at the quarter marks.
All schedules and the generator

Scheduling jobs, pipelines and cloud infrastructure is part of my DevOps engineering work.