A time-based breakpoint facility is provided for debugging a program upon expiration of a timer. More particularly, encountering a break exception during an execution of a program results in determining if the break exception is raised by a trigger or by a breakpoint. If the break exception is raised by the trigger, steps include breaking the program execution, starting a timer and resuming the program execution without passing control to a user interface thread until the started timer expires. If the break exception is raised by the breakpoint, steps include breaking the program execution, passing control to the user interface thread, performing a debugging operation, and resuming the program execution upon indication of the user interface thread.