Cron Every Other Week: Run a Job Every 2 Weeks

No cron expression runs every other week: cron fields describe minutes, hours, days of the month, months and weekdays, and nothing counts weeks. The setups that hold up are a weekly schedule such as 0 9 * * 1 with a check that skips alternate weeks, or settling for two fixed dates a month. */14 in the day-of-month field looks right but drifts.

Why */14 doesn't work

0 9 */14 * * matches the 1st, 15th and 29th of each month, because the step starts again every month. From November 2026 it runs on November 15, November 29, December 1 and December 15: 14 days apart, then 2.

0 9 * * 1/2 isn't it either. In the day-of-week field 1/2 means every second weekday from Monday, so Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, every week.

Option 1: weekly schedule, skip odd weeks in your endpoint

Schedule the URL every Monday at 09:00 (0 9 * * 1) and return early on alternate weeks. Count whole weeks since a fixed Monday rather than using the ISO week number: some years have 53 ISO weeks, which puts two odd weeks back to back.

// Runs every Monday; does the work every other Monday.
const ANCHOR = Date.UTC(2026, 10, 2); // Monday, November 2, 2026: a week that should run
const WEEK = 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
const weeks = Math.floor((Date.now() - ANCHOR) / WEEK);
if (weeks % 2 !== 0) return Response.json({ skipped: 'off week' });
// ... biweekly work

The off-week calls still show in the RunLater log with the skipped response, so you can see the schedule is alive. Each one counts as a run: a weekly request uses 4 or 5 runs a month.

Option 2: the same check in a crontab

# every other Monday at 09:00 (even weeks since 1970-01-01)
0 9 * * 1 [ $(( $(date +\%s) / 604800 \% 2 )) -eq 0 ] && /usr/local/bin/biweekly.sh

604800 is the number of seconds in a week. Change -eq 0 to -eq 1 to run on the other set of Mondays. Both % signs need a backslash in a crontab line.

Option 3: twice a month instead

If the job only needs to run about every two weeks, fixed dates are simpler: 0 9 1,15 * * runs on the 1st and 15th. For the first and third Monday, create two requests, 0 9 * * 1#1 and 0 9 * * 1#3 (see nth weekday schedules).

Every two weeks with a one-off start date

If the cycle starts on a specific date (a sprint, a payroll period), put that Monday in ANCHOR. The check keeps the rhythm across month and year boundaries because it counts weeks rather than calendar fields.

Related: every Monday at 9am and the cron expression guide.

Frequently asked questions