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GitHub Actions cron schedule

on.schedule · timezone: key or UTC · DST handled

Say when the workflow should run in your own time zone. You get the workflow YAML with GitHub's timezone: key, and the UTC-only version for runners and servers without it: one cron line per half of the year, plus a guard step so only the right one does the work.

How to schedule a GitHub Actions workflow in local time

1. Set the Time, the Days and your Time zone. The cron line below is written for you; edit it directly for schedules such as "every 15 minutes" or "the 1st of the month".
2. Check the messages. GitHub accepts no @daily-style shorthands and runs nothing more often than every 5 minutes.
3. If your GitHub supports it, copy Option 1: the local cron plus timezone:. GitHub then follows daylight saving time for you.
4. Otherwise use Option 2. The table shows the UTC cron for standard time and for daylight saving time, each checked against the local schedule. The workflow schedules both and a gate step drops the run whose local hour is wrong.
5. Commit the file under .github/workflows/ on the default branch: scheduled workflows run from there.

Why the UTC hour changes twice a year

Without timezone:, GitHub reads the cron in UTC. New York is UTC−05:00 in winter and UTC−04:00 in summer, so "09:30 on weekdays" is two different UTC schedules:

A local time late in the evening crosses midnight in UTC, and then the weekday moves too: 22:00 in New York on Monday–Friday is 0 3 * * 2-6 in winter. The tool shifts the day-of-week for you, and refuses when a day-of-month would have to move across a month boundary (plain cron has no "last day of the previous month"). The guard step is plain shell:

- id: gate
  run: '[ "$(TZ=America/New_York date +%H)" = "09" ] && echo "go=true" >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT" || true'
- name: Run the job
  if: github.event_name == 'workflow_dispatch' || steps.gate.outputs.go == 'true'
  run: ./do-the-work.sh

The tool simulates the guarded workflow across the next year's clock changes and says when it would skip or double a run.

What GitHub documents about scheduled workflows

• Five fields; day-of-week is 0-6 or SUN-SAT, month 1-12 or JAN-DEC. 20/15 in the minute field means 20, 35 and 50.
• No @yearly, @monthly, @weekly, @daily, @hourly or @reboot.
• The shortest interval is once every 5 minutes.
• Runs can be delayed at times of high load, especially at the start of every hour, and queued jobs may be dropped. An off-minute such as 17 is a safer pick than 0.
• Scheduled workflows run on the latest commit of the default branch.
• In public repositories, scheduled workflows are disabled after 60 days without repository activity.
• github.event.schedule holds the cron string that triggered the run.

The cron parser explains any line on its own, and the time zone converter rewrites schedules between arbitrary zones.

FAQ

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