Temporal governance is a prominent trait of EU migration law. It involves deliberate strategies of control over migrants’ time to dissuade unauthorised behaviour. While strategies of that nature are not new, they are at the heart of many of the changes introduced by the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. This research draws attention to mechanisms of temporal governance in the context of these recent reforms, arguing that individuals are thereby exposed to situations of protracted limbo, which can be singled out as one of the defining sources of migrants’ precarity. The New Pact consolidates and, on several occasions, aggravates this trend, subjecting individuals to situations in which they are stripped of control over their own time and fate. By examining the new rules on asylum procedures at the EU external borders and the reform of the Dublin system, this research explores the ways in which temporal governance affects the precarity of migrants.