Cron · Every 15 minutes · Quarter hour
Cron Job Every 15 Minutes
Updated: May 2026
A quarter-hour schedule is the sweet spot for many background jobs: frequent enough to feel near-real-time, but light enough to avoid hammering your servers. The expression is */15 * * * *.
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The expression
*/15 * * * * /path/to/commandThe */15 step in the minute field fires at minute 0, 15, 30 and 45 — the four quarter-hour marks. With asterisks in every other field, the job runs four times an hour, 96 times a day. An equivalent explicit form is 0,15,30,45 * * * *.
Why 15 minutes is a popular interval
Fifteen minutes balances freshness against load. It is common for syncing data between systems, generating dashboard metrics, retrying failed webhooks, or rotating short-lived tokens. Because 15 divides cleanly into 60, the runs always land on tidy clock positions, which makes logs easy to scan and correlate.
Useful variations
*/15 8-20 * * *— every 15 minutes between 8am and 8pm.*/15 * * * 1-5— every 15 minutes on weekdays only.5-59/15 * * * *— offset to minute 5, 20, 35, 50 to spread load.0,15,30,45 9-17 * * 1-5— explicit quarter hours, business hours, weekdays.
Avoiding the thundering herd
If many servers all run a job at */15, they fire simultaneously on the quarter hour and can overwhelm a shared resource. Spreading the offset per host — one at 0-59/15, another at 5-59/15, a third at 10-59/15 — staggers the load while keeping the 15-minute cadence. Paste any of these into the generator to confirm the exact minutes before you roll them out.
Frequently asked questions
Does */15 run at :00?
Yes. The step counts from minute 0, so the schedule is :00, :15, :30 and :45.
How is this different from every 15 hours?
Put the step in the minute (first) field for minutes. 0 */15 * * * would mean every 15 hours, which is rarely what people want.
Can I combine 15-minute steps with specific months?
Yes. */15 * * 6-8 * runs every 15 minutes during June, July and August only.