Louvre Museum Tickets: What to Know Before You Book

What the 2026 price change means for you, what a “skip-the-line” ticket actually skips, opening hours, which entrance to use, and how to visit with a licensed guide.

OfficialGuides is a marketplace of licensed independent tour guides — not the Louvre’s ticket office, which is ticket.louvre.fr. The two tour links on this page are affiliate links to an authorised reseller; your price is unaffected.

The walk-up ticket line at the Pyramid entrance. Everyone with a booked time slot bypasses this — including everyone who booked at face value on the official site.

Louvre ticket prices in 2026: what changed and who pays what

On 14 January 2026 the Louvre introduced two-tier pricing for the first time in its history. Residents and citizens of the EU and the European Economic Area — which includes Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway — continue to pay €22. Everyone else pays €32, a 45% increase.

Why it happened. The rise funds a long-term renovation programme announced by President Macron in early 2025, after the museum’s director described visiting the Louvre as a “physical ordeal” and parts of the building as being in very poor condition. The urgency sharpened in October 2025, when thieves took French Crown Jewels valued at around €88 million from the Galerie d’Apollon in a daylight robbery, exposing serious weaknesses in the building’s security. The Louvre is not alone: Versailles, the Musée d’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou and Sainte-Chapelle introduced similar two-tier pricing the same month.

What the standard ticket covers. The entire permanent collection — all three wings (Denon, Sully, Richelieu), every floor, and the 35,000 or so works on display — plus most exhibitions held inside the permanent galleries. Major temporary shows in the Hall Napoléon usually need a separate ticket, typically €4–6 extra.

Who enters free. Everyone under 18, regardless of nationality. EU and EEA residents aged 18 to 25, with valid ID. Also art teachers, some disability categories and their companions. Free entry still requires a reserved time slot — this catches people out constantly.

The price you should expect to pay. €22 or €32, booked directly at ticket.louvre.fr. That is the face value, and the official site is where you should look first. If you see a plain entry ticket advertised well above that figure, you are paying a reseller’s margin, not buying faster access. The next section explains why.

What “skip-the-line” actually skips at the Louvre

This is the part worth reading slowly, because it is where most Louvre budgets leak.

The Louvre runs a mandatory timed-entry system. Every ticket — the €22 one, the €32 one, and even the free ones — is tied to a 30-minute arrival window that you choose when you book. On the day, you go to the reserved-entry lane, not the walk-up queue. That is the skip-the-line system, and it is built into the standard ticket.

So when a third-party platform advertises a “skip-the-line” or “fast-track” Louvre ticket at €40, €50 or €80, it is not selling you faster entry than a €22 official ticket provides. The premium buys something else: a guide, an audio guide, a host who walks you to the Mona Lisa, an evening slot, or simply availability on a date the official site has sold out. Those can all be worth paying for — but decide with your eyes open about which one you are buying.

The one queue nobody skips. Security screening is mandatory and airport-style. No ticket, tour or price tier exempts you. Allow 15 to 20 minutes and arrive slightly before your slot.

When paying more is genuinely rational. Three situations. Your dates are sold out on the official site and a reseller still has inventory. You want a licensed guide, which the Louvre’s own ticket does not include. Or you want an evening slot on a guided tour, when the galleries are at their emptiest and the official late openings have already gone.

If your dates are sold out on the official site

This is the situation most people are actually in by the time they start reading pages like this one. Morning and weekend slots go weeks ahead in season, and the official site simply shows nothing available. Work through it in this order.

First, check the adjacent days. If your Paris dates have any flexibility at all, a Thursday slot often exists when Saturday doesn’t. The official calendar shows a month at a time — look at the whole month rather than the one date you had in mind.

Second, check the late openings. Wednesday and Friday evening slots fill later than mornings, because most visitors don’t think of the Louvre as an evening museum. If you can move your visit to 6:00 or 7:00pm on one of those two days, you will often find availability where the mornings have none — and the galleries are emptier anyway.

Third, check whether you’re eligible for free entry. Under 18, or an EU/EEA resident under 26? Free slots are a separate allocation from paid ones, so they can be open when paid slots aren’t. You still need to reserve.

If none of that works, resale platforms hold separate inventory. Tour operators are allocated their own entry slots in advance, which is why guided tours frequently remain bookable after plain entry tickets have gone. You pay more than face value, and what you’re paying for is availability plus a guide — not faster entry, which your ticket would have included anyway. On a trip where you’ve already committed to flights and hotels, that is usually a rational trade.

👥 When the official site is sold out
Semi-private guided tour (max 6) — check remaining dates →
Operators hold their own entry allocation, so dates are often still open here after plain tickets have gone.

Which entrance should you use?

The entrance you choose affects your wait more than the ticket you bought, and almost nobody plans this.

The glass Pyramid is the iconic main entrance — and the slowest, because it is the default for everyone who hasn’t thought about it. Beautiful, busy, and the longest security queue of the three.

The Carrousel du Louvre is the one to use if you have a pre-booked ticket. It is underground, reached from 99 Rue de Rivoli or directly from the Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre metro station without going outside. The security queue here is almost always shorter, and it is the default entrance for most pre-booked tours. In rain or summer heat, this alone justifies the walk.

The Porte des Lions opens directly into the Denon Wing, closest to the Mona Lisa. Its opening hours are limited and change without much notice, so only plan around it if you have confirmed it is open on your day.

The Carrousel du Louvre entrance, reached from 99 Rue de Rivoli or straight from the metro. Usually the shortest security queue of the three entrances.

Opening hours and closed days

The Louvre is open every day except Tuesday. Standard hours are 9:00am to 6:00pm, with late opening until 9:45pm on Wednesdays and Fridays. Last admission is one hour before closing, and staff begin clearing the galleries 30 minutes before.

Also closed on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. If a public holiday falls on a Tuesday, the museum stays closed as usual — it does not open to compensate.

The best windows. The crush is heaviest between 11:00am and 3:00pm, and worst on weekends from June to September. Two sweet spots: right at 9:00am opening on a Wednesday or Thursday, or after roughly 5:30pm on a Wednesday or Friday late opening, when the day-trippers have gone and the galleries breathe again. April–May and September–October are noticeably calmer than midsummer.

When is the Louvre free?

Beyond the always-free categories, the museum opens to everyone free of charge on the first Friday of each month after 6:00pm — suspended in July and August — and on 14 July, Bastille Day.

The catch is real. Free entry still requires a reserved time slot, and those slots vanish within hours of release. Expect the galleries to be packed on free evenings. If your priority is actually seeing the art rather than saving €22, a paid weekday-morning slot is the better trade.

How to get there

The Louvre sits on the Right Bank in the 1st arrondissement, dead centre in Paris.

What to see, and how long you need

With more than 35,000 works across eight departments, the Louvre rewards a plan far more than an attempt to see everything. Most first-time visitors get a satisfying visit in three to four hours: the headline works plus one collection that genuinely interests them. If you only have two hours, the three anchors can be done efficiently.

Where experienced visitors go instead. The Richelieu Wing holds Napoleon III’s apartments, the Northern European paintings including Vermeer and Rembrandt, and the Mesopotamian collection with the Code of Hammurabi. It carries a fraction of the crowds of Denon. The Egyptian antiquities in Sully are similarly underrated — a lot of visitors end up rating them above the paintings.

One practical thing: opposite the Mona Lisa hangs Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, at nearly 7 by 10 metres the largest painting in the Louvre. Almost nobody sees it, because everyone in the room is facing the other way. Turn around.

Wear comfortable shoes — people routinely log 15,000 to 20,000 steps inside — and download the official Louvre app before you arrive. Its map alone saves a lot of wrong turns in a building that confuses Parisians.

The Mona Lisa in Room 711 of the Denon Wing. Crowds are thickest from 10:30am to 3:00pm.

Visit the Louvre with a private licensed guide

A timed ticket gets you through the door. A licensed private guide turns 35,000 works into the thirty that matter for you — reading the room, sequencing the route, and handling entry so your hours go on looking at art rather than at maps.

As a rough figure, a private licensed guide in Paris costs around €80 to €100 per hour for the group, not per person, with museum entry usually paid separately. For a family or a group of four, that often works out cheaper per head than a semi-private tour — and you set the pace. You book the guide directly, with no agency mark-up in between.

Guided tour options, compared with the official ticket

For clarity, here is how the entry-only price sits against the guided options. Remember that all of them include the same timed entry — the difference is what comes with it.

Tour prices are starting figures and vary by date and availability. No ticket or tour, at any price, exempts you from the security screening.

• Also planning the Eiffel Tower or the Palace of Versailles? Note that Versailles introduced two-tier pricing in the same round of changes.

Frequently asked questions