When item or file is modified - Recurrence not working as intended?

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Posted on by MW-19111501-0

I have this automated flow where if an item in our Sharepoint list is updated, it will send an email notification to the person who created the entry. To avoid potentially spamming someone with multiple changes in a day, I set a condition to first check if the "Modified date" was in the last 24 hours. However, this was assuming that the "Recurrence" option under the "When an item or file is modified" trigger would only check for updates once at 3:00 pm each day, as it is set to an interval of "1" and frequency of "day". But according to the run history, it seems to be triggering for any update at any time of day. Did I misunderstand this setting, or is someone else wrong?

This screenshot shows that the Recurrence to check for items in the trigger action is set to 1 day at 3:00 pm CST.

This code view of the trigger action shows that the recurrence details in the code match what is input in the parameters view.

The run history from yesterday shows it ran multiple times throughout the day, not limited to just once at 3:00 pm.

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David_MA 15,607 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Your understanding is not correct. When you set the "How often do you want to check for items?" interval in the "When an item or a file is modified" trigger in Power Automate, it checks for any modifications that occurred within the specified interval and then processes them at the start time of the next interval.
For example, if you set the interval to 1 day, Power Automate will check for any modifications that happened during the past day and then process them at the start time you specified for the next day. This ensures that any changes made within the interval are captured and processed accordingly.

What you probably want to do is add a trigger condition instead that checks if the modified date is more than 24 hours from the current date/time. This would be an example of such a trigger: @greaterOrEquals(subtractFromTime(utcNow(), 24, 'hour'), triggerOutputs()?['body/Modified'])

You can learn about trigger conditions at Microsoft Power Automate Trigger Conditions: Example-based Guide - Citizen Development Academy
miloslava 2 on at

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Hello @David_MA ,

I have the same issue. In my opinion, the answer you provided is not entirely accurate, because when I set it to check once a day at a specific time, it doesn’t make any difference — the flow is triggered on every change on the moment of the edit.

My expectation is that when I configure this task to run once a day, it will check for changes exactly at that time and start the flow for each file that was modified in the last 24 hours.

Could you please explain in a bit more detail how to correctly use this option and how to achieve the desired result?