Do you need to book the Rijksmuseum in advance?

Everyone has to reserve a start time, including Museumkaart holders, but almost nobody needs to do it early. A full day has eight start times, and on the morning we counted, three separate dates had all eight still open: the next day, the coming Saturday and a Thursday a month away. Even the same day still had six, and the two missing ones had simply already passed. This is the opposite of the Van Gogh Museum, where the earliest slot left for that day was 12:15.

How much is a Rijksmuseum ticket?

25 euros for an adult, free for anyone aged 18 or under, and free with a Dutch Museumkaart, an Amsterdam City Card or an ICOM card. Holders of an EYCA or CJP youth card pay half. Note that the museum contradicts itself here: its tariff page advertises 11,25 euros for that half price while its own shop charges 12,50, which is the exact half of 25. The shop is the one that takes your money.

What are the Rijksmuseum opening hours?

09:00 to 17:00, every single day of the year, public holidays included. The last entry slot is 15:30, an hour and a half before closing. The shop and the cafe stay open until 18:00, and between 17:00 and 18:00 you can walk into both without a museum ticket at all.

Rijksmuseum or Van Gogh Museum: which should I choose?

If you can only do one and your dates are tight, the practical answer is the Rijksmuseum, because it is the one you can still get into. Both cost 25 euros and both are free under 18, but the Van Gogh sells entry in 31 fifteen-minute slots that go early, and the Rijksmuseum sells eight hourly ones that were all still open on three of the four dates we checked. If you are choosing on the art rather than the logistics, that is a different question and not one a measurement can answer.

Is there an official Rijksmuseum guided tour?

Yes, and it is the cheapest guided tour of this museum anywhere: 7,50 euros on top of the 25 euro ticket, so 32,50 in total, for two hours with a live guide in a group of no more than 15. The catch is availability and language. It runs in English only, is for ages 16 and over, and of the nine days left in September when we looked, exactly one had places.

Does the Willem de Kooning exhibition cost extra?

No. From 9 October 2026 to 17 January 2027 the exhibition is included in the normal 25 euro admission, with no supplement at all. We checked by putting it in the basket: the total stayed at 25,00.

Rijksmuseum: tickets, hours and whether you need to book

The short answer

The Rijksmuseum does not sell out. The Van Gogh Museum, five minutes away and at exactly the same price, does. That single difference decides more Amsterdam itineraries than any argument about Rembrandt versus Van Gogh, and it is a thing you can only know by counting.

All 8 slots were free on three of the four dates we checked, including the coming Saturday. Today it was 6, and the two missing ones had already passed.
The museum sells a live guide for 7,50 EUR, so 32,50 EUR all in. The cheapest equivalent on a booking platform is 84,77 EUR, which is 2.6 times as much.
But book that guide weeks ahead. Of the 9 days left in September, exactly 1 had places. The entry never runs out and the guide almost always has.
Between 17:00 and 18:00 the shop and cafe are free to enter. The museum prints it on its own tariff page and almost no guide repeats it.

For when the official tour has no date, no Spanish and no children

Rijksmuseum small-group tour with entry included

4.75 · 1,889 reviews

We would rather you paid the museum 32,50 EUR for its own guide, and further down we spend a table saying so. This is here for the three cases where that door is shut: you do not want it in English, since this runs in seven languages including Spanish and Mandarin; you are bringing children, since the official tour starts at 16 and this one at 4; or your date is not the single day in nine that the museum had open. It is the best rated of the shared tours at 4.75 on 1,889 reviews, the group cap is the same 15, and it cancels free 24 hours out, which the museum's does not. We have not taken it. The full reasoning, with the figures

84,77 EUR

2 h · entry included · max 15 · free cancellation

Check availability on Viator

How hard it is to get in, counted

The museum sells entry in timed start times, one an hour from 09:00 to 15:00 plus a last one at 15:30, which is 8 in a full day: 09:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 13:00, 14:00, 15:00, 15:30. On the morning of 22 September we walked its own booking calendar for four separate dates and counted what was still open.

Start times still available, counted on one Tuesday morning

Booking for	Slots left	Earliest	What was gone
Same day (Tuesday)	6 of 8	11:00	Only 09:00 and 10:00 missing, and only because they had already passed
Next day (Wednesday)	8 of 8	09:00	Nothing gone
The coming Saturday	8 of 8	09:00	Nothing gone
A month out (Thursday)	8 of 8	09:00	Nothing gone

Swipe to see the rest of the table.

Availability: counted by walking the museum's own booking calendar on 22 September 2026 at around 11:40 Amsterdam time, for four separate dates, clicking each day and confirming the calendar had actually moved before reading the slots. A full day offers 8 start times. This is one snapshot on one morning, not a series: the exact counts will differ when you look, and what matters is the shape.

Nothing was sold out. Not the next day, not the Saturday, not a single day in September or October. We checked every date in both months and the calendar offered all of them. The only slots missing anywhere were this morning's 09:00 and 10:00, and they were missing because it was already gone eleven.

That sounds like a non-finding until you put it next to the museum next door. Counting the Van Gogh Museum's calendar the same day, as we did in the Van Gogh review, it had 16 of its 31 slots left and nothing before 12:15. Same city, same square, same 25 euros, opposite problem.

Rijksmuseum or Van Gogh Museum

This is the question people actually ask, and it only has an answer with prices and opening times in it. Both museums measured on 22 September 2026.

The two big museums on the Museumplein, measured the same morning

	Rijksmuseum	Van Gogh Museum
Adult ticket	25,00 EUR	25,00 EUR
Under 18	Free	Free
Closing time	17:00	18:00, and 21:00 on Fridays
Time slots in a full day	8, one an hour	31, one every 15 minutes
Slots still free for the same day	6 of 8	16 of 31
Earliest slot left that morning	11:00	12:15
A month out	All 8 free	All 31 free
Human guide sold by the museum	Yes, 7,50 EUR	No, audio only at 3,75 EUR
Plain entry resold by platforms	None found	From 39,00 EUR
If your plans change	Rebooking possible if a slot is open	Non-refundable

Swipe to see the rest of the table.

Both columns measured on 22 September 2026 from each museum's own ticket shop, by the same method: walking the booking calendar and counting.

They are the same price and they are not the same purchase. The Van Gogh is the one to book first, because it is the one that runs out, it does not refund, and it does not sell you a guide. The Rijksmuseum tolerates being decided late, will try to move your slot if your plans change, and has the cheapest guided tour in the city attached to it.

Which one has the better art is not something this page can measure, and the five minute walk between them is short enough that the honest answer for most people is both, in that order, which is how we sequenced day one of the two day itinerary.

What it costs

Admission, from the museum's own shop

Ticket	Price
Adult	25,00 EUR
Aged 18 and under	free
EYCA or CJP youth card	12,50 EUR
With a Museumkaart	free
Official guided tour, on top of entry	7,50 EUR
Entry plus official guided tour	32,50 EUR

Swipe to see the rest of the table.

Prices, opening hours and conditions: the museum's own pages, rijksmuseum.nl, read on 22 September 2026. Where the tariff page and the ticket shop disagree on the EYCA rate, both figures are given below and the shop is the one that charges you.

Free admission is wider here than people expect. It covers 6 categories: Anyone aged 18 or under; Dutch Museumkaart; Amsterdam City Card; ICOM; Friends of the Rijksmuseum; Vereniging Rembrandt, KOG, VVAK, VriendenLoterij VIP card. The under 18 rule is the one that changes a trip budget, and it is why the two expensive looking art museums are the cheap part of a family day rather than the dear part, which we worked through in the guide to Amsterdam with children. The Museumkaart on that list does not carry across the square, though: at the Moco Museum, two minutes away and privately owned, it takes 30 per cent off instead of letting you in free.

There is no cheap resale of a plain Rijksmuseum ticket, and that is worth saying because there is one for the Van Gogh. We looked: the cheapest thing on a booking platform that gets you in is 45,02 EUR and it bundles a canal cruise, rated 3.37 on 95 reviews. Nobody is quietly reselling the 25 euro entry at 39 the way they are next door. Buy it from the museum.

The guided tour the museum sells for 7.50

Search for a Rijksmuseum guided tour and you get a page of platform listings between 45 and 280 euros. What almost none of them tell you is that the museum runs its own, for 7,50 EUR on top of the ticket: 120 minutes, a live guide, a maximum of 15 people. That is 32,50 EUR all in.

The same two hours, from the museum and from a platform

	Museum	Cheapest platform equivalent
Total price	32,50 EUR	84,77 EUR
Duration	120 min	120 min
Maximum group	15	15
Languages	English only	Seven, including Spanish and Mandarin
Minimum age	16	4
Days with places, of the 9 left in September	1	All of them
Free cancellation	Not offered	Up to 24 hours before

Swipe to see the rest of the table.

Tour prices, ratings and review counts: Viator's API, queried on 22 September 2026. Nobody on this site has taken any of them.

On price it is not close: 32,50 EUR against 84,77 EUR, for the same two hours and the same maximum of 15 people. If you speak English, are over 16, and can fix a date, book the museum's own and stop reading this section.

The reason to keep reading about the other one is the row that is easy to skip. Of the 9 days left in September when we counted, the official tour had places on 1, Sunday 27 September, with 7 start times on that one day. October was better at 17 days of 31, with 1 to 9 October and 26 to 30 October closed. So for a lot of people the cheap official tour is not a choice that exists, and the alternative is a platform, another language, or children.

Opening hours, and the free hour at the end

The museum opens 09:00 to 17:00, every day of the year, public holidays included. That last clause is its own wording and it is not filler, because it takes in Christmas Day and King's Day, when a good deal of Amsterdam shuts. The last start time sold is 15:30, ninety minutes before closing.

The shop and the cafe stay open until 18:00, and from 17:00 you can go into both without a ticket. One free hour a day, every day, inside the building, in the part with the coffee and the books. The museum states it plainly on its tariff page. It is not the Night Watch, but if you are walking past the Museumplein at half five with no plan, that is a thing to know. In December the square itself is the other half of that plan: the Christmas Village on Museumplein runs 3 to 27 December 2026 and is free to walk into, right in front of the building.

Two smaller ones. The gardens around the building, which are free in their own right, open summer only, 09:00 to 18:00, so they are not an option on a November trip. And the museum is entirely cashless: card or phone, no notes, anywhere, including the cafe.

What is on: Willem de Kooning at Work

From 9 October 2026 to 17 January 2027 the museum shows Willem de Kooning at Work, and it does not cost a euro more than the normal ticket. We checked the only way worth checking: we selected it in the shop and watched the total, which stayed at 25,00 EUR. Of the 31 days in October it was already bookable on 23, the unavailable ones being the eight before it opens.