Cron at End of Business Day (5 PM Weekdays)

The cron expression 0 17 * * 1-5 schedules a task to run at 5:00 PM every weekday, marking the end of the standard business day.

Field-by-field breakdown:

• 0 (Minute): At minute 0. The task fires at the top of the hour.
• 17 (Hour): At hour 17 (5 PM). This aligns with the conventional end of business hours in most industries.
• * (Day of Month): Every day from 1 through 31. No restriction on the day of the month.
• * (Month): Every month from January through December. No restriction on which month.
• 1-5 (Day of Week): Monday through Friday. The range covers all five standard business days.

This means your task will execute 5 times per week, once each weekday at 5:00 PM. The end-of-business-day trigger is the natural counterpart to the start-of-business-day pattern. It is the ideal time to generate daily activity summaries, archive the day's data, deactivate business-hour services, send end-of-day reports to management, or trigger overnight batch job preparation. This timing ensures the task has access to the full day's business activity while still running before evening maintenance windows begin. Pair this with a 9 AM start-of-day cron for complete business-day bookending. This expression is supported by standard cron on Linux/macOS, as well as cloud services like AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Scheduler, and GitHub Actions.