Intrinsic timescales of neurons represent their temporal receptive fields. They inform on the position of the area they were recorded from in the cortical hierarchy and reflect information encoding dynamics. Using laminar recordings, here we investigate the differences of intrinsic timescales between dorsal premotor (PMd) and primary motor (M1) cortex, and across cortical depth, during a visuomotor delayed reaching task in two macaques. For each neuron, autocorrelograms computed from interspike intervals were fitted with an exponential function to estimate the time decay constant (𝜏) as a measure of timescale. We obtained three main findings. First, the median 𝜏 estimated from M1 significantly exceeded that of PMd, suggesting that M1 is positioned higher than PMd in the cortical motor network hierarchy. Second, timescales of neurons in superficial layers (L2/3) were significantly longer than neurons in layer 5 (L5) in PMd. This aligns with propositions in the literature of longer timescales in L2/3 due to increased local recurrent excitatory inputs. Third, long 𝜏 neurons in PMd across cortical depths showed enhanced movement direction encoding towards movement onset as compared to short 𝜏 neurons. Notably, long 𝜏 neurons exhibited off-diagonal generalization in cross-temporal patterns, indicating their ability to recall information used for early planning during movement initiation. Our work provides valuable insights into motor cortical temporal dynamics, at the laminar level. Lastly, our study aims to understand the significance of the diversity of timescales within the motor cortex and how this diversity contributes to encoding various parameters crucial for movement planning and execution.