The problem of residence time controllability in dynamical systems with stochastic perturbations is formulated. The solution is given for linear systems with small, additive, white-noise perturbation. It is shown that the existence of the desired residence time controller depends on the relationship between the column spaces of the control and noise matrices. If the former includes the latter, any residence time is possible. If this inclusion does not occur, the achievable residence time is bounded: lower and upper estimates of this bound are given. For each of these cases, controller-design techniques are suggested and illustrative examples are considered. The development is based on an asymptotic version of the large deviations theory.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>