2 day Amsterdam itinerary

Two days in Amsterdam is usually written as a list of stops. The stops are the easy part: there are ten of them and they have been the same for twenty years. What decides how much of your two days you spend on your feet is the order, and the order has a cost in minutes. "The order will depend on which museums you're doing" without a single number after it.

Which is strange, because an itinerary is a problem of order. The list of things worth seeing in Amsterdam is not in dispute and has not changed in twenty years. What you are actually choosing when you read one of these pages is a sequence, and a sequence has a cost you can measure.

So here is that cost. Fourteen points geocoded, the walking time between every pair of them from a routing engine, and every possible order of each day tested rather than approximated: with five stops there are 120 orders and all 120 fit in a thousandth of a second. The answer below is exact.

The two days, and what the wrong order costs

Each day below is the shortest order of its own stops. The last two columns are the same stops walked in the worst order possible, which is the price of getting it wrong.

Over two days that is 74.8 minutes against 141.9. The order is worth 67.1 minutes and 5.59 km, which on a two day trip is most of a museum.

Nobody walks the theoretical worst order on purpose, and we are not suggesting anyone does. The point of the worst column is that it puts a number on the range: this is how much room there is between a good plan and a bad one, in a city small enough that people assume it does not matter.

Day one: the two art museums

49.7 minutes of walking, 4.15 km. The order is fixed at one end by the Rijksmuseum, which closes at 17:00 and therefore has to go early, and the rest falls out of the geography.

09:00, Rijksmuseum

Opens at 09:00 and closes at 17:00, the tightest window of the three museums. That is the reason it goes first, not its reputation.

Eight hours is the shortest opening window of the three museums on this page, and that single fact decides the shape of day one. Everything else that day is open later or is not a building at all.

11:30, Van Gogh Museum, five minutes away

Five minutes from the Rijksmuseum, the shortest hop of day one. It closes at 18:00, an hour after the Rijksmuseum, which is the other half of the reason this pair goes in this order.

Five minutes is the shortest hop of the day, and the reason these two always get paired. On this one occasion the obvious pairing and the measurement agree.

13:30, Vondelpark, sixteen minutes west

Sixteen minutes west, and the first long walk of the trip. It is also the only leg where the walking is the point rather than the cost of getting somewhere.

This is the first leg where you feel the distance, and it is the one leg where that is fine: the walk through the park is the reason the park is on the list. If you are short of time, this is the stop to cut, and cutting it takes the day down rather than shuffling it.

15:00, Leidseplein, the longest leg of the trip

The longest single leg of the two days. It earns it by sitting between the park and the canal ring: putting Leidseplein anywhere else in the day adds a return journey rather than saving one.

19.5 minutes is the longest single walk in these two days. It survives the optimiser anyway, because Leidseplein sits on the line between the park and the canal ring: moving it earlier or later means walking that stretch twice instead of once.

16:30, the Nine Streets

Ends the day inside the canal ring rather than out at the edge of it, which matters because this is where you will be eating.

Ending the day here rather than back at the museums is the other half of why the order works. You finish inside the canal ring, which is where you will want to eat, and the area we recommend staying in is a few minutes further along the same canals.

If you are going to eat well on one of the two nights

Day one ends in the canal ring at about half past four, which is the natural slot for a food tour: they run in the late afternoon and early evening, and they double as dinner. We priced ten of them from seven operators on the same day, and the cheapest of the comparable ones is also the longest and the best rated.

Day two: the old centre

25.1 minutes of walking, 2.08 km, which is half of day one. Everything on day two is inside a kilometre of everything else, and the whole day is a line running south east from the Jordaan.

09:30, Noordermarkt, in the Jordaan

The northern end of the Jordaan. Starting here instead of at the Anne Frank House is what makes the rest of the day fall into a line.

The obvious start to this day is the Anne Frank House. Starting one street north instead turns it from a there-and-back into a straight line, and saves 5.4 minutes: 25.1 against 30.5.

10:30, Anne Frank House

Timed entry booked weeks earlier, so in practice your slot decides this day rather than this page does. It is the only genuinely fixed point in the two days.

The time above is the one we would pick, but in practice you do not pick it. Tickets are sold for a specific slot and released six weeks ahead, so the honest instruction is to book first and rearrange the rest of day two around whatever you are given. The rest of this day tolerates it: nothing else on it closes before 17:00.

12:30, Dam Square

Halfway between the canal ring and the old centre, with the Royal Palace on it.

14:30, the Oude Kerk, in De Wallen

The oldest building in Amsterdam, standing in the middle of the Red Light District.

Six minutes from the Dam. This is the Red Light District in daylight, which is a different place from the one it is famous for being, and the church at the middle of it is the oldest building in the city. One rule applies to this stretch and surprises people: smoking cannabis in the street in the city centre is banned, with nuisance fines from 100 to 650 euros, however tolerated it is inside a licensed shop.

15:30, Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder

A church hidden in the attic of a canal house, and at 1.8 minutes from the Oude Kerk it is the shortest walk anywhere in these two days.

It is the least famous stop of the ten and the one we would defend hardest, because it costs 1.8 minutes of walking to add. A whole church built in the attic of a merchant's house, from the years when Catholic worship was banned in the city, two minutes from the Oude Kerk.

Opening hours decide the order, not fame

The most famous of the three museums is the one with the most flexible hours. The Anne Frank House is open from 09:00 to 22:00, a thirteen hour window. The Rijksmuseum closes at 17:00 and gives you eight. So the museum that usually goes first is the one that least needs to, and the one that quietly dictates the whole trip is the one you would not think to build around.

Read that table as a set of constraints rather than as information. The eight hour window is the binding one, so the Rijksmuseum anchors day one. The thirteen hour window is the loose one, so the Anne Frank House can sit anywhere in day two that its ticket allows. The Van Gogh Museum, at nine hours, sits in between and conveniently five minutes from the Rijksmuseum.

Two caveats we would rather print than hide. The Van Gogh Museum stays open until 21:00 on Fridays, which if your day one is a Friday changes what is possible: the museum day stops being the constraint. And it shortens its hours in parts of October, November and December, so the nine hour figure is the standard day and not a promise for every date.

What the tickets cost

Three museums, one adult: 25.00 at the Rijksmuseum, 25.00 at the Van Gogh Museum and 16.50 at the Anne Frank House, the last of which includes a 1.00 euro booking fee. That is 66.50 euros for the fixed part of a two day trip.

Under 18s are free at both art museums, so a family of two adults and two teenagers pays 100 euros for the two art museums instead of 200, and then 7.00 per child at the Anne Frank House. Students pay 16.00 at the Van Gogh Museum with a card from an institution in the EU or EEA.

About the Museumkaart, the annual pass that covers most Dutch museums: it is 75,00 euros for an adult plus a 4,95 registration fee, so 79,95. That figure comes from NEMO Science Museum, which sells the card and publishes both rates; the card's own site does not show a price without entering its purchase flow.

On these three museums alone it does not pay for itself: your tickets come to 66.50 euros against 79,95. It turns on a fourth museum. Add NEMO at 21,50 and the four come to 88,00, which beats the card by 8,05. If you are travelling with children the arithmetic changes again, and not in the direction you would guess: we worked it out for a family of four.

A real day, measured eight years later

Everything above argues that the order is worth optimising. Here is the honest test of that claim, and it does not come out the way the argument wants it to.

On 16 November 2018 Diego spent a day walking Amsterdam without planning any of this. He took eight photographs that day, which is how the route is known. That is not a memory of a route: it is a record of one, and it can be measured with the same routing engine as the rest of this page.

That order took 59.3 minutes of walking and 4.94 km. The shortest possible order of those same eight points is 58.2 minutes and 4.85 km. He beat the planning by getting within one minute of the optimum without doing any.

So the lesson is not the one the top of this page implies. The order is worth optimising when the day is scattered. His was not: the Dam, down to the Muntplein, across to the canal, up to the Anne Frank House, back to the Damrak and into De Wallen is very nearly a straight line, and on a line there is nothing to optimise.

Day one of this itinerary is the opposite case. It mixes two museums in the south, a park to the west and the canal ring to the north, and that is why the worst order of it costs 30 minutes more than the best. Look at the shape of your day before you spend any time reordering it.

Two things that page cannot claim, and will not. Between 13:57 and 18:38 there is not a single photograph, so four hours and forty minutes of that day are unmeasured and the 4.94 km is a floor rather than a total. And his order was constrained by things a router knows nothing about: the time on an Anne Frank House ticket, lunch, and the fact that by 18:38 it had been dark for two hours.

Is two days enough

For these ten stops, comfortably, and the walking is not what limits you. 74.8 minutes spread across two days is about 37 minutes a day between stops, which is less than most people walk commuting.

What limits you is the eight hour window at the Rijksmuseum and how long you stay inside each museum, which is the one thing on this page we cannot measure for you. If you are the kind of visitor who does the Gallery of Honour and leaves, two days is generous. If you read the labels, day one is two museums and nothing else, and that is a legitimate way to spend it.

What two days does not leave room for is a day trip. Zaanse Schans is 17 minutes by train and Haarlem is 15, so both are tempting and both cost you a museum. We put the numbers on all ten of them in the day trips guide, and the honest reading for a two day trip is that they belong to a three day Amsterdam itinerary, where the third day is the one that absorbs them.

The times of day in the two tables are a proposal worked back from each opening hour, not a measurement, and they do not account for stopping. The walking figures are routing distance between doors.