Official first
Official ticket site: tickets.museivaticani.va
- On sale
- Online only at tickets.museivaticani.va. No sales window published; on 25 October dates ran to 31 December 2026.
- Price
- €25 online (€20 plus a €5 booking fee), €20 at the ticket office. Reduced €10 (plus €5 online) for ages 7 to 18 and students up to 25.
- Named ticket
- Yes. Every visitor's name at purchase, ID checked at the entrance. No name, date or time changes.
- Timed entry
- Half-hour slots, 8:00 to 17:30 online. Final entry 18:00.
- Free entry
- Under 7s. Everyone on the last Sunday of the month, 9:00 to 14:00, with no online booking.
Start with the official ticket shop
The Sistine Chapel, the Gallery of Maps, the Raphael Rooms and the Laocoön all sit on Vatican City's list, and every one of them sits behind a single Vatican Museums ticket. Every page of museivaticani.va carries the same line: "The only official site for purchasing tickets online is tickets.museivaticani.va". It warns about scam sites on domains that look like the official one and charge far more. The shop works in Italian and English only.
This is a planning guide, not a report of a recent visit. The rules and prices below come from museivaticani.va and its ticket shop, checked on 25 October 2026, and the sold-out dates described are what the shop showed that day.
Why it sells out
Since 1 January 2024 every ticket carries the names of its visitors, and staff check ID against them at the entrance. The museum says it brought this in to fight resale and ticket-buying bots. Each ticket is also tied to a half-hour entry slot, from 8:00 to 17:30 on a normal day. The museum does not publish how many people a slot takes.
On 25 October 2026 the standard ticket was sold out on every date checked from 26 October to 14 November. On many later November dates only the 17:00 and 17:30 slots were left, and 24 and 28 to 31 December were already fully gone. Nothing in 2027 was on sale yet. The calendar is tight too: the museums close on Sundays, except the last one of the month, and on a run of religious holidays.
Official options first
- Book the museum's own guided tour. It costs €40 (€30 reduced), lasts about two hours, includes entry and runs in English, Spanish, Italian, French and German. On 25 October it still had places on dates where the plain ticket was gone, such as 14 and 21 November and 28 and 30 December. The museum also runs an Art and Faith tour (€40, about 90 minutes, ending in the Sistine Chapel) and a Vatican Gardens and Museums tour (€45, about three hours, starting in the morning).
- Take the last slots of the day. The 17:00 and 17:30 slots are often the last to go. Final entry is 18:00 and the museums close at 20:00, with visitors asked to leave the halls 30 minutes before, so a 17:30 entry still leaves about two hours, in must30's view.
- Try again. The shop's own sold-out message says "Please try again." The museum publishes no waiting list and says nothing about returns, so this is persistence, not a system.
- Try the ticket office. A ticket bought there without a booking costs €20, but the museum does not say whether any are left on the day, so treat it as a gamble.
- Go on the free Sunday. Entry is free on the last Sunday of each month, from 9:00 to 14:00 with final entry at 12:30, unless it falls on Easter, 29 June or 25, 26 or 31 December. Free entry cannot be booked online. The next ones are 29 November and 27 December 2026. The bookable free-Sunday guided tour (€20) was already sold out for both. Expect a long queue, in must30's view.
Tours and resold tickets with entry included
The Vatican Museums publish a list of accredited tour operators for 2026, linked from their prices page. GetYourGuide is on it, along with Tiqets, Musement, Headout, Klook and others. A tour or ticket from an accredited operator is a route the museum recognises, even though it calls its own shop the only official place to buy online.
The name rule travels with every ticket: the names of all visitors are taken at purchase, staff check them against ID, and names cannot be changed afterwards. must30 leads with guided tours with entry, which is also what the official shop still had when plain tickets were gone. Expect to pay more than €25.
If you book through these links, must30 earns a commission at no extra cost to you.
Timing that helps
From Monday to Saturday the museums open from 8:00 to 20:00, with final entry at 18:00. The rest of 2026 has closures on 8, 25 and 26 December, and Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are short days, with entry from 8:00 to 13:00 and closing at 15:00. On 10 November 2026 the museums open at 9:00. A ticket is valid only on its date, and it covers the museums and the Sistine Chapel but not St Peter's Basilica, which is separate.
Dress for a church. Sleeveless or low-cut tops, shorts above the knee, miniskirts and hats are not allowed. In the Sistine Chapel the rule is silence, and photos, video and phones are forbidden.
What not to do
- Do not buy from a site whose address only looks like the museum's. The official shop is tickets.museivaticani.va.
- Do not book with names that will not match your passports. Names cannot be changed once the booking is made.
- Do not count on changing or refunding. Date, time and party size are fixed, and tickets, booking fees and extras are non-refundable.
- Do not take out your phone in the Sistine Chapel.
Keep planning
- Vatican City's list, where the museums appear in rows such as "Gaze at the Sistine Chapel ceiling painted by Michelangelo" and "Explore the Vatican Museums’ Gallery of Maps".
- The case for doing the famous thing early, on timing the big sights.
- One week in Italy: pick a lane, not a loop, for fitting Rome and the Vatican into a week.
- The other ticket guides, including the Colosseum and the Uffizi.