First Day of Month

Use in your stack

# First day of every month at midnight
0 0 1 * * /usr/local/bin/monthly-billing.sh

# Equivalent shortcut (Linux crontab)
@monthly /usr/local/bin/monthly-billing.sh

{ "cron": "0 0 0 1 * ?", "timezone": "UTC" }

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: monthly-billing
spec:
  schedule: "0 0 1 * *"
  timeZone: "UTC"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: billing
            image: my-image:latest
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

cron(0 0 1 * ? *)

@Scheduled(cron = "0 0 0 1 * *")
public void monthlyJob() { /* ... */ }

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 1 * *'

Next runs

Pick a timezone to see when this expression fires next.

Variations

Common use cases

• Monthly billing runs or invoice generation.
• Calendar-month reports (usage, revenue, KPIs).
• Rotating monthly credentials or secrets.
• Archiving the previous month's data and starting a fresh window.

Gotchas

• On Linux crontab, `@monthly` is shorthand for `0 0 1 * *`. Kubernetes CronJob accepts it; GitHub Actions does not.
• AWS EventBridge: `0 0 1 * ? *` — uses `?` for day-of-week.
• Months have different numbers of days, but the 1st always exists — this is one of the safer date-anchored schedules.
• If you want the last day of the month instead, see the [last-day-of-month pattern](/last-day-of-month) — Unix cron can't express it directly.

Frequently asked questions