diff --git a/playwright.config.js b/playwright.config.js
index 307bd44f..af64a6a5 100644
--- a/playwright.config.js
+++ b/playwright.config.js
@@ -5,6 +5,13 @@ module.exports = defineConfig({
   testDir: './test/specs',
   testMatch: '*.js',
   fullyParallel: true,
+  // Retry on CI only. The specs themselves are deterministic, but the runner is
+  // shared and oversubscribed, and a loaded one occasionally takes longer than
+  // the 30s default timeout just to load a fixture page - the failure is a
+  // `page.goto` timeout rather than a failed assertion. Without retries a single
+  // slow page load fails a whole matrix row. Locally, retries would only hide
+  // a genuinely flaky spec, so leave them off there.
+  retries: process.env.CI ? 2 : 0,
   reporter: 'list',
   use: {
     trace: 'retain-on-failure',