Family things to do in Amsterdam

Taking children to a city is mostly an exercise in multiplying by four, and the age bands are where that arithmetic stops being simple.

Every figure below comes from the attraction's own website, read on the same morning, with the age bands exactly as each one publishes them.

What Amsterdam costs a family, attraction by attraction

The family here is two adults and two children aged 8 and 12. Those ages are not arbitrary: the Anne Frank House is the only one of the five with two separate child bands, split at 9, so one child falls either side of it.

One caveat on that 8 year old, and it is the museum's own: the Anne Frank House says it maintains a minimum age of 10 and that it is not suitable for younger children, while adding that parents must judge for themselves. So the 0 to 9 ticket exists and the museum would rather you thought twice before using it. It stays in the table because it is a real price on a real price list, but we would not plan a day around taking an 8 year old in. What the museum says about visiting with children.

If you are not travelling with children, the same question without the family filter is in what the ranking lists actually agree on: we counted the eight of them and they only coincide on two things.

Two adults: 235,00 euros. The same two adults with two children: 337,00. The children add 102,00, and 94 of those 102 euros come from two of the five attractions.

Guided options, if you would rather not organise it

Our pick

Bike tour, highlights and hidden gems

★★★★★★★★★★4.90 · 4,465

We Bike Amsterdam run it. Infant seats on request, and the child rate needs two paying adults.

39,50 EUR

3 h · max 12 · free cancellation

Check availability

Zaanse Schans windmills, small group

★★★★★★★★★★4.74 · 2,879

The windmills without driving. By train it is 17 minutes and 4,20 euros, and we say so in the day trips guide.

42,50 EUR

3 h 30 · small group · free cancellation

Check availability

Classic saloon boat canal cruise

★★★★★★★★★★4.85 · 33,462

The cheapest thing here and the one with a roof, which on a wet afternoon with children is the whole point.

16,49 EUR

1 h · covered boat · free cancellation

Check availability

Those three are the ones that survived a filter, and what did not survive is worth a line. The private tours sold as "for kids and families" run from 189 to 260 euros and carry between zero and fourteen reviews, so there is nothing to judge them on. And one very cheap, very popular walking tour deserves its own warning, below.

The famous museums are the free ones

This is the finding, and it runs exactly opposite to how these trips get planned. The Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum are the two attractions a family is most likely to assume are for grown-ups and to leave out, and they are the two where children cost nothing at all. Not a reduced rate. Nothing.

Meanwhile NEMO Science Museum, which is built for children, charges the same 21,50 for a four year old as for an adult, and the ARTIS zoo charges 25,50 from the age of three against 29,50 for an adult. The places designed around children are the places that price them like adults.

None of this makes NEMO or the zoo bad value, and this page is not telling you to skip them. It is telling you that the sentence "the museums will be expensive with the kids" is false here, and that the budget lives somewhere other than where people put it.

The five, one by one

Every price and every opening time below comes from that attraction's own site on 17 September 2026. Where a walking time appears it was measured on the OpenStreetMap network, the same way as everywhere else on this site.

Rijksmuseum: 25,00 for you, nothing for them

Free under 18, with no reduced band and no paperwork: the child ticket is zero. Two adults pay 50,00 whether they bring children or not. It opens at 09:00 and closes at 17:00 every day.

That eight hour window is the tightest of the five and it is the reason our two day itinerary starts here rather than at the more famous Anne Frank House. With children the same logic applies twice over: this is the one that closes first.

Van Gogh Museum: also free under 18, and open later

The same 25,00 for an adult and the same zero for anyone under 18, plus 16,00 for students with a card from an institution in the EU or EEA. It opens at 09:00 and closes at 18:00, an hour after the Rijksmuseum, and stays open until 21:00 on Fridays.

It is five minutes on foot from the Rijksmuseum, which is the shortest hop between any two attractions in this guide. Two adults and two children can do both museums for 100,00 euros total, and that is the cheapest half-day of culture available to a family in this city by a wide margin.

Anne Frank House: the only one with two child bands

16,50 for an adult including a 1,00 euro booking fee, 7,00 from 10 to 17, and 1,00 from 0 to 9. It is the only attraction of the five that splits children into two bands, and the split is at 9, which is why the worked example on this page uses an 8 year old and a 12 year old.

It is open from 09:00 to 22:00, the widest window of the five, so it is the one you can most easily move around a day. The catch is the booking: tickets are sold online only, with no door sale of any kind, and released every Tuesday at 10:00 CEST for a visit six weeks later.

Whether the house suits a particular child is a judgement we are not going to make for you. What we can say is that it involves steep stairs and a queue, and that the museum itself publishes guidance on age suitability.

NEMO: the one that charges a four year old full price

21,50 per person from the age of 4, with no distinction between adults and children, and free from 1 to 3. A family of four pays 86,00, which is more than the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum charge that same family combined.

It is 13 minutes on foot from Amsterdam Centraal, 1,10 km, which makes it the easiest of the five to reach on arrival or before a train out. It is open from 10:00 to 17:30, Tuesday to Sunday.

Check the day before you go. NEMO opens on Mondays only during school holidays, on public holidays and from March to 24 August. A Monday in, say, late October is a closed door, and it is the sort of thing that ruins a day when you are travelling with children.

ARTIS: the largest single line in the family column

29,50 from 13 years, 25,50 from 3 to 12 and free up to 2, all as online from-prices that move with the date. A family of four is 110,00 euros, the most expensive entry in this guide, and the two children account for 51,00 of it.

Buying at the gate costs 3,00 euros more per person than buying online, which for a family of four is 12,00 euros for the sake of doing it in advance. The zoo is open 09:00 to 18:00 every day.

One thing worth knowing if the price is the problem: the Artisplein, the square inside the grounds, is free to walk into daily from 07:00 to 23:30 according to the zoo's own opening hours page. It is not the zoo, and we have not been to check what you can see from it, but it costs nothing.

ARTIS is 25 minutes on foot from Centraal and 13 from NEMO, and it is the one attraction on this page the Museumkaart does not cover.

The Museumkaart pays for an adult and loses on a child

The Museumkaart is the annual pass that covers most Dutch museums. It costs 75,00 euros for an adult and 39,00 for under 18s, plus a 4,95 euro registration fee on each card.

For an adult doing the four museums on this page, the sums are close and favourable: 88,00 euros of separate tickets against 79,95 with the card, so it saves 8,05 and anything else you visit is free.

For a child it is a straight loss. A 12 year old pays 28,50 euros for those same four museums, because two of them are free and the Anne Frank House charges 7,00. The card would cost 43,95. The thing that makes Amsterdam cheap for children is the same thing that makes the card pointless for them.

Note that the card does not cover the ARTIS zoo, which is the single largest line in the family column above. Whatever you decide about the card, the zoo is extra.

NEMO and the zoo are thirteen minutes apart

Both sit east of the old centre, and they are closer to each other than either is to the Dam. If you were going to give the two expensive ones their own day, the geography cooperates.

NEMO is 13 minutes from Amsterdam Centraal, which makes it one of the most reachable attractions in the city and an obvious first or last morning. The zoo is 25 minutes from either Centraal or the Dam, and 13 from NEMO.

For how far everything else is, and for which neighbourhood puts you closest to it, we measured all eight areas on foot. Seven of the eight are within six minutes of a tram stop, which matters more with a pushchair than the walking times do.

Every figure here is the cost of getting in. It does not price food, transport or a room, so treat it as the admission budget rather than the day's budget.