The I amsterdam City Card

What it covers, and the two names missing from the list

The card covers more than 70 museums and attractions, a canal cruise with any of the major operators, a full day of bike hire and all GVB transport. That much is on the card's own sales page. What decides whether it is worth buying is not that list, it is the two places that are not on it.

On the city's own website every venue has a listing and every listing carries a label. The Rijksmuseum, Moco, NEMO, the Stedelijk, the Rembrandt House and A'DAM Lookout all say “Free with the I amsterdam City Card”. In the same carousel, on the same page, the listings for the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House say only “Tickets Available”, with no card label at all.

What it costs, from the city and from a platform

The price falls steeply with length, which is the one genuine argument in the card's favour. A one day card is 67 EUR a day and a five day card is 28 EUR a day, so the longer cards ask much less of you per day to break even.

A children's card, for ages 4 to 17, is 40 EUR whatever the length, which changes the arithmetic for a family considerably: it is a flat fee against a set of museums that mostly charge children something.

Whichever length you pick, the price is only half the question. The other half is what you were going to spend anyway, and that is a sum worth doing before you buy rather than after.

The sum, three ways

Every figure here is a measured price. The entries come from each museum's own page on this site, the cruise is the cheapest of the six operators we priced, and the transport is GVB's own 2026 fare.

That is the itinerary most people are actually describing when they ask whether the card is worth it, and on it the card loses by 52,01 EUR. Two of the five lines are the ones it does not cover, so you buy the card and then buy those tickets anyway.

Here it wins, and it is worth being precise about by how much: 5,94 EUR over three days. That is the reward for visiting four museums, taking a cruise and using the trams throughout, having given up the Van Gogh and the Anne Frank House to do it.

How much you have to do for it to pay

There is a clean way to put the threshold. The cruise and the transport are worth about 37,99 EUR of the 115 EUR three day card, and they come with it whatever you do. That leaves 77,01 EUR to earn back from entries.

The included attractions we have priced average 20,74 EUR each, so you need 4 of them in 72 hours before the card starts paying for itself, on top of using the cruise and the trams. Four museums in three days is a real holiday for some people and a forced march for most, and that is the honest answer to the question.

The other version, which is easier to buy by mistake

There are two cards and the purchase page offers them side by side.

The Explorer card drops public transport entirely, which matters more than it sounds: GVB is 10 EUR a day and 21,50 EUR for three days in 2026, so taking it out removes one of the few parts of the card that everybody uses. If you are choosing Explorer because you only want three specific places, price those three tickets first. That comparison usually settles it in a minute.

Card prices and the two variants read in the purchase configurator on iamsterdam.com on 29 October 2026. Transport fares from gvb.nl the same day, 2026 column. A'DAM Lookout from adamlookout.com the same day. The Rijksmuseum, NEMO, Moco, Van Gogh, Anne Frank and canal cruise figures are ones measured for this site on their own pages. Platform price, rating and review count from the Viator API on 29 October 2026, against the official price read the same day. Nobody on this site has used the card.