diff --git a/vitest.config.ts b/vitest.config.ts
index 3a81fb3..3674fb9 100644
--- a/vitest.config.ts
+++ b/vitest.config.ts
@@ -20,5 +20,22 @@ export default defineConfig({
     include: ['packages/*/test/**/*.test.ts', 'apps/*/test/**/*.test.ts'],
     environment: 'node',
     reporters: ['default'],
+    /**
+     * Above Vitest's 5s default, which was never a deliberate choice here.
+     *
+     * The heaviest tests are integration tests that do real work rather than compute:
+     * the locked-protocol guards initialise scratch git repositories and run the CLIs
+     * as child processes, and the dashboard tests build the site and hash artifacts.
+     * They peak around 2s on a developer machine, and Windows CI runners are several
+     * times slower at process spawning and file I/O, so 5s sat close enough to the
+     * edge that the Windows job failed intermittently on a different handful of tests
+     * each time while Ubuntu passed.
+     *
+     * This is headroom, not permission to be slow: a genuinely hung process still
+     * fails the run, and any test that actually approaches this ceiling is doing
+     * something worth looking at.
+     */
+    testTimeout: 20_000,
+    hookTimeout: 20_000,
   },
 });