A system and method for dynamic halt-polling control includes a memory, one or more physical processors in communication with the memory, and a hypervisor executing on the one or more physical processors. In an example, the hypervisor enables halt-polling and disables monitoring of a guest in a virtual machine. Then, the hypervisor exposes the monitoring to the guest. In an example, the hypervisor detects a monitoring instruction executed on a virtual central processing unit (VCPU) of the virtual machine. The monitoring instruction is executed by the guest, which causes an exit to the hypervisor while the monitoring is disabled. Responsive to detecting the monitoring instruction that causes the exit to the hypervisor, the hypervisor disables the halt-polling and enables the monitoring of the guest.