This article analyses the temporalities of transnational living through a threefold frame: as an outlook, as a resource and as a qualitative experience. Drawing on data from interviews with Moldovan women who are domestic workers in Italy, I point to the time work employed by these labour migrants to navigate a multitude of timescapes derived from a (permanently) temporary status, precarious resources and the emotional ambivalence that arises from being away from their families. I show how migrants' envisioned temporariness of transnational living materialises into a time‐bound outlook, which, in turn, compels them to manage time as a scarce resource, that has to be managed, planned and worked with. Lastly, I indicate that maintaining a temporary outlook correlates with a halting strategy and may have significant effects on personal and family well‐being.

This paper puts forward a two-sided approach to late capitalist time regimes in paid household work by comparing the experience of time of domestic workers and domestic employers. Their time-related strategies are confronted with the aim of revealing common underlying patterns as well as possible divergences. First, migrant domestic workers’ strategies to cope with the (time) particularities of domestic work (e.g. asynchronies, free time deficit, long working hours, boredom) are analysed. Second, the experience of time of professionally active domestic employers, who in turn are pressured in their professional lives and employ domestic workers to meet these demands, is examined. The authors argue that domestic employers’ and workers’ time regimes interact and reinforce one another, creating a double time-bind. The data are drawn from Cojocaru’s research project on migrant domestic workers in Italy and Rosińska’s research on employers as well as local and migrant workers in Poland.