Musée du Louvre

Louvre hours and tickets in 2026

The Louvre is open 9 a.m.–6 p.m. on Monday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 9 a.m.–9 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday. It is closed Tuesday. Last entry is one hour before closing, and the museum begins clearing rooms thirty minutes before closing.[1]

• Monday: 9 a.m.–6 p.m.
• Tuesday: closed
• Wednesday: 9 a.m.–9 p.m.
• Thursday: 9 a.m.–6 p.m.
• Friday: 9 a.m.–9 p.m.
• Saturday: 9 a.m.–6 p.m.
• Sunday: 9 a.m.–6 p.m.
• Annual closures: 1 January, 1 May and 25 December

Rates applicable from 14 January 2026 are €22 for European Economic Area residents or citizens and €32 for non-European Economic Area visitors. Admission is free for visitors under 18 and for European Economic Area residents or citizens under 26, with proof. The museum also offers free admission to everyone on the first Friday of the month after 6 p.m., except July and August, and on 14 July. A free visit still benefits from a reserved time slot.[1]

Reservations are required for almost all visitors from 1 July through 31 August 2026. Outside that period, the museum recommends booking, and a time slot is the practical way to protect the visit when the building reaches capacity. Buy only from the official ticket service; the Louvre warns that supposed third-party “jump the queue” tickets may be fraudulent.[2]

How long should a first visit take?

Allow about three hours for a first visit. That is enough time to follow one coherent route, stop in front of several works and absorb the fact that the galleries occupy a former palace. Three hours is not enough to see the entire museum, but trying to cover everything in one visit usually makes the experience worse.[2]

For a shorter visit, use the museum's official 90-minute Masterpieces trail. For a half day, choose two departments and no more than three or four priority works. Adding more names to the list usually means spending more of the visit navigating corridors and less of it looking.[3]

• 90 minutes: one official trail, if every required room is open.
• Three hours: the best first-visit length for a focused route.
• Half a day: two departments, a meal or rest, and time for the palace itself.
• A full day: possible, but tiring; plan a long break and expect diminishing attention.

Which Louvre entrance should you use?

Use the Pyramid if you are an individual visitor and want the entrance that is easiest to understand. Its queues are separated for visitors with tickets or a Paris Museum Pass, visitors without tickets, and visitors with priority access. The familiar entrance is not automatically the fastest, but it is the main one.[4]

• Pyramid: main entrance for individual visitors, including ticket holders, Museum Pass holders and visitors without tickets.
• Carrousel, 99 Rue de Rivoli: accepts groups, members and visitors with tickets; it also connects to the underground shopping center and car park.
• Porte des Lions, Quai François-Mitterrand: ticket holders only; closes at 6 p.m., with last entry at 5 p.m.; equipment loans are unavailable there and locker service ends earlier.
• Passage Richelieu, Rue de Rivoli: reserved mainly for groups, members, museum activities and auditorium events.

Entrance rules can change during construction, special events and busy periods. No entrance is always the fastest. Access rules and queues change, so check the Louvre's live entrance map on the day of your visit.[4]

What to see on a first visit

Begin with one work you already care about, not with a universal checklist. If that work is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, go there first and accept that the room is designed for a crowd. Then choose works that pull you into different periods: the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, the medieval fortress foundations, the Islamic Art galleries or one run of French and Italian painting.[5]

For a manageable first visit, combine one famous work, one department explored slowly and one part of the palace's architecture. Trying to visit fifteen famous works usually means more walking and less time looking closely.[3]

Room availability matters more than any static list. The Louvre closes galleries periodically for renovation, technical work and weather conditions. On Wednesdays and Fridays, Level 2 rooms open at 10:30 a.m. Check the live schedule after choosing a route, then prepare a substitute department rather than treating a closed room as a failed day.[6]

The palace before the Pyramid

The Louvre began as a fortress around 1190, built near the western edge of medieval Paris. French rulers expanded and rebuilt it into a royal palace. The monarchy eventually moved its court to Versailles, but the Louvre remained a place for royal collections, academies and artists.[7]

The Muséum central des arts opened here on 10 August 1793, during the French Revolution. The act changed the meaning of the palace: objects gathered by rulers were reorganized for a public museum, although who could enter, what was displayed and how the collections had been acquired remained political questions.[7]

Ieoh Ming Pei's Pyramid opened in 1989 above a new underground reception hall. The Pyramid did not replace the historic palace. It created a central entrance above an underground lobby connecting the museum's wings. Visitors now experience Pei's modern entrance and the older palace as parts of the same museum.[8]

The Louvre Pyramid

The glass pyramid in the Cour Napoléon is the museum's main entrance and the roof of an underground lobby. It is not a monument standing on its own: everything it does happens below it, where a single reception hall connects the palace's three wings. Before it existed, the Louvre had no central entrance at all, and visitors picked one of several doors into a building that gave them no way to understand its shape.[9]

It came out of the Grand Louvre, the rebuilding programme President François Mitterrand commissioned in 1981. The Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei was appointed in July 1983, and the Pyramid was inaugurated on 29 March 1989 after four years of work.[8]

• 21 metres high, on a 35-metre square base covering about 1,000 m².
• 675 diamond-shaped panes and 118 triangular ones — roughly 2,000 m² of glazing, 21 mm thick, made by Saint-Gobain.
• A frame of about 6,000 bars and girders meeting at 2,150 nodes, weighing 95 tonnes, with a further 105 tonnes of glazed aluminium.
• Inaugurated 29 March 1989; architect Ieoh Ming Pei, appointed July 1983.

The glass is the argument. Pei wanted panes with no green tint at all, so that the palace façades would stay visible straight through the structure from both inside and out. A tinted pyramid would have read as an object dropped in the courtyard; a clear one lets you see the seventeenth-century building through the twentieth-century one. That is why the specification was so demanding and why Saint-Gobain had to make the glass specially.[10]

It was widely hated before it was built. Placing a modern glass structure in the courtyard of a royal palace was attacked as vandalism, and the criticism was loud, sustained and often personal. The museum's own account of the episode is titled, drily, "A transparent controversy". The objections have not aged well: the Pyramid is now among the most recognisable buildings in the world and photographing it is, for many visitors, the reason they cross the courtyard at all.[10]

For a visit, treat it as the front door rather than a sight. It is free to stand in the Cour Napoléon and look at it — no ticket, no queue — and the courtyard is open when the museum is closed, which makes Tuesday evening a good time to photograph it without crowds. Going through it requires museum admission, and it is not automatically the fastest way in: see the entrance guidance above.[9]

Langston Hughes's first morning in Paris

Langston Hughes arrived at the Gare du Nord in February 1924 with seven dollars, no room, no job and no acquaintances in Paris. He rode toward the Opéra, walked through wet snow to the Place de la Concorde, followed the Seine past the Tuileries and entered the Louvre.[11]

The first attraction was practical. The museum was warm. Hughes looked at the Venus de Milo and the Greek statues and decided that if they had survived Paris for centuries, he might manage it too.[11]

He told the story in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea. Hughes's account presents the Louvre as a place of refuge rather than an intimidating monument. He entered to get warm, studied the Greek sculptures and left feeling more hopeful about surviving in Paris.[11]

Accessibility, bags and practical details

Disabled visitors and one accompanying person receive free admission and priority access with supporting documents. The Pyramid's central tube lift serves visitors with disabilities, wheelchairs and prams. Wheelchairs, canes, folding stools, rolling chairs, sensory bags and other equipment are available free from the assistance area in exchange for identification.[12]

Free self-service lockers are available beneath the Pyramid and at Porte des Lions, but luggage and bags larger than 55 × 35 × 20 centimeters are not permitted. The information desks beneath the Pyramid distribute maps in nine languages. Free Wi-Fi is available, and an audio guide can be reserved for an additional fee.[13]

The nearest Métro stop is Palais-Royal / Musée du Louvre on lines 1 and 7; Pyramides on line 14 is another useful approach. Do not schedule another timed attraction immediately after the museum. Entry, security, navigation and the final walk out of the palace all take longer than the number printed on the ticket.[4]

Official planning links

• Current hours, prices and official tickets

  Use this for the final hours, admission rate, free-entry rules and reservation requirements.

• Live entrance map and museum map

  Check which entrance is open and download the latest floor plan.

• Schedule of open galleries

  Check this on the day because room closures change the practical route.

• Official 90-minute Masterpieces trail

  A manageable first route when its rooms are open.

• Accessibility information

  Priority access, equipment, transport and current accessible-route information.