This paper uses a temporal lens to examine the ways in which localization agendas in the humanitarian aid sector shape Jordanian aid workers’ upward mobility as humanitarian professionals. Localization policies call for humanitarian aid organizations based in the global North (e.g., CARE, Oxfam) to increasingly rely on global South actors to make aid more sustainable, equitable, and effective amidst an unprecedented number of protracted humanitarian crises globally. However, it is not yet fully clear what the effects of these policies are on aid operations, including how they impact the division of labor in the sector. Namely, how does localization affect the workers themselves who are employed in humanitarian aid? Drawing upon over 90 interviews with aid workers in Jordan from 2017-2018, as well as ethnographic observations of their daily routines in urban and rural areas throughout the Kingdom, I find that localization policies produce particular constructions of who local workers are, and how they can provide value to their aid organizations in ways that are often at mismatch with workers themselves, and the contexts they operate in. I find that these constructions of the local manifest temporally through the structures of recruitment, tasks, and turnover(s) that local workers experience in their jobs. Drawing upon sociological theories related to work and the labor process, I therefore argue that the organization of time in workers’ lives and daily routines, including how they strategically pace time and think about their futures both in and outside of the workplace, maintain and delineate local workers as a distinct other within the sector and in the global division of labor more broadly. In so doing, this paper calls into question who can claim, and what entails, being a humanitarian in the contemporary world and why. The MENA region’s status as the largest producer and host of protracted humanitarian crises worldwide, suggests that these findings have critical implications for labor market and employment dynamics broadly construed in the contemporary Levant as well.