A mechanism for virtual device interrupt hinting in virtualization systems is disclosed. A method of the invention includes receiving a virtual device event from a host central processing unit (CPU) of a multi-CPU host machine, the virtual device event directed to a virtual machine (VM) managed by the hypervisor on the host machine, identifying one or more virtual CPUs (VCPUs) of the VM that are running on the host CPU, and providing the identified one or more VCPUs of the VM as a hint to the VM, the hint sent to the VM with the virtual device event, wherein the VM programs a virtual device associated with the event to deliver interrupts to a VCPU of the VM identified in the hint.