Schedule expressions using rate or cron - AWS Lambda

Schedule expressions using rate or cron

AWS Lambda supports standard rate and cron expressions for frequencies of up to once per minute. Rate expressions are simpler to define but do not offer the fine-grained schedule control that cron triggers support.

EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) rate expressions have the following format.

rate(Value Unit)

Where Value is a positive integer and Unit can be minute(s), hour(s), or day(s). A rate expression starts when you create the schedule. For a singular value the unit must be singular (for example, rate(1 day)), otherwise plural (for example, rate(5 days)).

Rate expression examples
Frequency Expression

Every 5 minutes

rate(5 minutes)

Every hour

rate(1 hour)

Every seven days

rate(7 days)

Cron expressions have the following format.

cron(Minutes Hours Day-of-month Month Day-of-week Year)
Cron expression examples
Frequency Expression

10:15 AM (UTC+0) every day

cron(15 10 * * ? *)

6:00 PM (UTC+0) Monday through Friday

cron(0 18 ? * MON-FRI *)

8:00 AM (UTC+0) on the first day of the month

cron(0 8 1 * ? *)

Every 10 min on weekdays

cron(0/10 * ? * MON-FRI *)

Every 5 minutes between 8:00 AM (UTC+0) and 5:55 PM (UTC+0) weekdays

cron(0/5 8-17 ? * MON-FRI *)

9:00 AM (UTC+0) on the first Monday of each month

cron(0 9 ? * 2#1 *)

Note the following:

  • All scheduled events use UTC+0 time zone.

  • If you are using the Lambda console, do not include the cron prefix in your expression.

  • One of the day-of-month or day-of-week values must be a question mark (?).

For more information, see Using Lambda with Amazon EventBridge Scheduler.