Run a Cron Job on the 1st of Every Month

Setting day-of-month to 1 with wildcards for month and day-of-week creates a monthly schedule. The job runs at 00:00 on the first day of each month—commonly used for billing cycles, monthly reports, and license renewals. This is the go-to pattern for any task that needs to run exactly twelve times per year on a predictable date.

The minute and hour are both 0, and the day-of-month is set to 1. Month and day-of-week are wildcards. The cron daemon matches this pattern only when the calendar date is the 1st of any month, resulting in 12 executions per year. Note that the day-of-week wildcard is ignored when day-of-month is explicitly set in most cron implementations.