The article advocates an explicitly class as well as gender-based approach to the study of couples’ working time. It is concerned with connecting two major research themes; variation in time poverty and the organization of the domestic division of labour. The article draws links between these two research themes by means of a review of debates in key studies and an analysis of dual-earner couples from different classes in the British Household Panel Survey. It concludes that it is necessary to incorporate a class-based analysis to reveal how the different dimensions of time poverty intermesh and play out on the daily lives of families, and the resulting ways in which families’ caring and paid working lives are managed on a day-to-day basis.
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