Trello recurring tasks don't need an automation rule. Set a cadence on the card's due date, choose recycled or fresh cards, and send your weekly email too.

Every board has a handful of jobs that come back on a schedule. The Monday standup, the invoice run on the last working day, the client update you send every Friday afternoon.

They're on your board somewhere, and you're still the person who has to remember them, which means that they can sometimes fall through the cracks.

Trello recurring tasks fix that at the card level, and this article covers how to set one up, the single decision that trips people up, and how to make a recurring card send its own email using Email for Trello.

Make a card repeat itself

Open the card, click Dates, set a due date, then pick a cadence from the recurring option. The card now carries its own schedule.

When you mark it complete, Trello moves the due date to the next occurrence and flips the card back to not done. It comes round again on its own, and everything on it stays where it was: the description, the checklist, the comments, the attachments you keep needing.

Two things to know:

Setup happens on the web, so you can work with recurring cards in the mobile apps but you can't create new ones there.
The cadence will always be based on the due date, so removing the date removes the repeat task.

It forgives a bad week

Schedules slip, and this handles it better than most recurring systems.

Shift a weekly Wednesday card to Thursday because you were out sick, and the next due date still lands on the following Wednesday. You've moved one instance, not redefining the entire pattern. The cadence you set using the due date is what the card keeps coming back to.

That matters more than it sounds: recurring setups usually get abandoned the first time real life knocks them out of sync!

Should you use the same card or new card?

This is where some people get stuck in the process, and it comes down to a single question. Do you need a record of each task?

A recurring due date recycles one card. Your standup card in six months is the same card it is today. That's ideal when you want the history in one place and nobody will ever go looking for "the standup from March 14."
Sometimes you want a new card instead. A monthly invoice run is the clearest use case: if March, April, and May are the same card, you have one card and no evidence the March task happened.

Anything you'd want to search back through, report on, or hand to someone else needs its own card each time. That's a scheduled rule in Trello's automation, still widely called Butler, and we've already written a recipe that you can use: create a recurring card and set a due date covers the trigger and actions, with the beginner's guide to Trello automation rules alongside it if you haven't built one before.

The quick test: if you'd ever search for last quarter's copy, make a new card. If you only care about the next one, let the card repeat itself.

💡 TIP If you already have a scheduled rule that only creates a card and sets a date, the recurring due date now does that job with nothing to maintain and no automation quota used. Keep the rule when it also adds members, builds a checklist, or touches another board.

Three recurring tasks that work on most boards

Weekly meeting. One card, weekly cadence, agenda in the description. Complete it after the meeting and it rolls to next week with the notes still attached. This is the case the recycled card was made for.
Monthly invoice run. Scheduled rule on the last working day, creating a fresh card with a checklist of clients and a due date a few days out. New card each month, so you keep the paper trail.
Quarterly review. Scheduled rule on the first day of the quarter, creating the card and adding the people who need to act on it. Give it a due date two weeks out so it shows up in Calendar view before it's urgent.

Notice the pattern: the thing you personally do on repeat uses a recurring due date, and the thing the team needs a record of uses a rule.

Sending an email from your recurring card

Plenty of recurring work ends with a message going out: a Friday client update, a monthly statement, a check-in that keeps sliding to next week.

Because Email for Trello sends email from ordinary Trello comments, an automation rule can send it for you. A comment starting with @reply goes to the card's most recent contact, @email goes to recipients you name, and the thread stays on the card either way.

Point that at a recurring card and the task cadence becomes a send schedule:

Trigger: when a card is due in 1 day
Action: post comment @reply #weekly-update

The #weekly-update keyword pulls in a Saved Reply, so the client gets a proper template with their name and details filled in at send time. Now the recurring card does both halves of the job: it comes back on Friday, and it sends the update when it does.

Our post on scheduling follow-up emails from Trello cards covers the same pattern on a one-off timer if you'd rather send after a delay than on a cadence.

Marking recurring tasks as complete

A card marked as complete before its due date arrives will not fire automation that triggers on "when a card becomes due." Ticking a recurring card off early is completely normal, and when someone does, any rule hanging off that trigger doesn't run. The card rolls to its next date looking perfectly healthy.

If the rule moves the card somewhere, you'd spot it within a cycle or two. If the rule sends your weekly client email, you might not spot it for months.

That's why we recommend setting the rule above to trigger on due in 1 day rather than "becomes due." This allows for it to fire while the card is still open and unticked, whatever anyone does with the checkbox afterwards.

💡 TIP Use "due in 1 day" for anything that sends an email or notifies a client, and save "becomes due" for rules where nothing breaks if someone finishes early. More on automating email with Trello automation.

Start with one

Pick the recurring job you're most tired of remembering, open its card, and give it a cadence. It takes under a minute, and the test of whether it worked is simple: in a week, did you think about it before Trello did?

Once one is running, the rest of them are obvious. The complete guide to Trello automation is there when you want the recurring card to do more than arrive.

How to set up recurring tasks in Trello