Your GitHub Actions cron fires less often than you declared: what we measured and how to design for it

We run an automated publishing pipeline entirely on GitHub Actions cron schedules — no server, no queue, just workflows that wake up, do one thing, and commit the result. It mostly works. But there is one behaviour of scheduled workflows that the docs mention in a single quiet sentence and that will silently halve your job frequency if you design around the cron expression instead of around reality:

Scheduled workflows do not fire as often as you declare.

What we measured

We had a feedback-watcher workflow declared at four runs per hour:

on:

Your GitHub Actions cron fires less often than you declared: what we measured and how to design for it

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