Venice Entry Fee (Contributo di Accesso)

How much is the Venice entry fee?

Two prices apply. Pay by the fourth-to-last day before the date you want to visit and the fee is 5 EUR per person. Pay inside the four days running up to the visit and it is 10 EUR. The city council confirmed both figures for 2026, unchanged from 2025, with the explicit aim of pushing visitors into booking early (VeneziaToday, 2025b). There is no family rate and no weekly ticket: the charge is per person, per day.

The title you buy is valid until 24:00 on the date printed on it and must carry your name and surname to be valid (Comune di Venezia, 2024a). It covers the whole historic centre for that day, so there is no second charge for moving between sestieri or for leaving and coming back.

Refunds are possible. A request made before the day the title is valid is settled by cancelling the title, and the regulation sets a floor of 2.90 EUR below which nothing is repaid when the daily-threshold mechanism is not in use, which means a 5 EUR or a 10 EUR title can be refunded. Requests made on or after the day of validity require proof that you did not enter the city, or that an exclusion or exemption applied to you (Comune di Venezia, 2024a).

On which days is the Venice entry fee charged?

The fee is not a permanent charge. It applies only on dates fixed in advance by the city council, and only between 08:30 and 16:00. Outside those hours and outside those dates you walk into Venice with nothing to pay and nothing to register.

For 2026 the council set 60 non-consecutive days, six more than the 54 used in 2025 (ANSA, 2025). The pattern was Friday to Sunday through April, May, June and July, with two longer unbroken runs from 24 April to 3 May and from 29 May to 7 June. The published dates were 3 to 6, 10 to 12, 17 to 19 and 24 to 30 April; 1 to 3, 8 to 10, 15 to 17, 22 to 24 and 29 to 31 May; 1 to 7, 12 to 14, 19 to 21 and 26 to 28 June; and 3 to 5, 10 to 12, 17 to 19 and 24 to 26 July (VeneziaToday, 2025a).

That season is over. The trial closed on 26 July 2026 and the control points were dismantled for the rest of the year. The city said the 2027 dates would be announced in the following months and could exceed 60, so anyone planning a spring 2027 trip should check the official portal before assuming either way (Chioggia Notizie, 2026).

Who is exempt from the Venice access fee?

The regulation splits people who do not pay into two groups. Exclusions cover residents of the Comune di Venezia, workers and commuters who work in the historic centre or the smaller islands, students at schools and universities based there, and anyone who pays IMU property tax in the municipality, together with their household. Exemptions cover a much longer list: guests staying in registered accommodation anywhere in the municipality, people registered as temporary residents, anyone born in Venice, residents of the Città Metropolitana di Venezia and of the Veneto region, children under 14, people with certified disabilities and one companion, patients travelling for treatment or a medical appointment and those accompanying them, athletes at recognised sporting events, tenants on non-tourist residential leases, secondary school groups on educational trips, and spouses, civil partners and relatives up to the third degree of anyone resident in the old city or the islands (Comune di Venezia, 2024a).

Being exempt is not the same as being able to ignore the system. In the trial years the city required workers, students and most exempt categories to register on the portal as well, so that the exemption could be checked (Comune di Venezia, 2024b). The registration produces a QR code you carry in place of a paid title. In 2026 the recorded exemptions included 3,407 workers from outside the Veneto and roughly 5,000 non-resident owners paying IMU (VenetoNews, 2026).

Where the fee applies: the historic centre only

The area covered is the Città Antica, defined in the regulation as Ambito Territoriale Omogeneo n. 1 of the city's territorial plan, which is the island city itself (Comune di Venezia, 2024a). The regulation also allows the fee to be extended to the smaller lagoon islands listed in its second annex, among them the Lido, Pellestrina, Murano, Burano, Torcello, Sant'Erasmo, Mazzorbo, La Certosa, San Servolo and Poveglia. That power has not been used: in every year of the trial so far the islands have been left out (Comune di Venezia, 2024b; VeneziaToday, 2025a).

There are also transit areas where the fee is not due, provided you stay inside them. They are the Ponte della Libertà, Piazzale Roma and the area directly connected to it, Santa Lucia railway station, the Stazione Marittima, the San Basilio terminal and the Isola Nova del Tronchetto (Comune di Venezia, 2024a). In practice this means you can arrive by train, bus or car, cross to a vaporetto for Murano or the Lido, and leave again without owing anything. It is only stepping off that route into the old city, on a chargeable day and inside the chargeable hours, that creates the obligation.

How to pay and what happens if you do not

Payment and exemption registration both run through the official platform at cda.ve.it, a multichannel, multilingual system built for the city by Venis SpA, backed up by staffed desks and automatic machines (Comune di Venezia, 2024b). You enter your dates, pay if the fee is due, and receive a title carrying a QR code. Keep it, on paper or on your phone, and be ready to show it: the regulation obliges the holder to produce either the paid title or the proof of exclusion or exemption on request (Comune di Venezia, 2024a).

Checks are made at the main entry points by dedicated staff, stewards, inspectors and local police, coordinated by the city and Vela SpA. Anyone who fails to show a valid title, or who shows one for the wrong date, or who has made a false declaration to obtain an exemption, faces an administrative penalty of 25 EUR to 150 EUR, and the 10 EUR fee is due on top of it (Comune di Venezia, 2024a). The scale of enforcement is real rather than theoretical: local police issued 2,642 penalty notices during the 2026 season, all of them still under review at the close of the trial (VenetoNews, 2026).

Entry fee or tourist tax, and has it worked?

The two charges are alternatives, not extras. The regulation states that the access fee applies in place of the imposta di soggiorno, the overnight tax collected by hotels and other registered accommodation (Comune di Venezia, 2024a). If you sleep in the municipality you pay the overnight tax through your host and owe nothing at the gates. If you come for the day from outside, and none of the exemptions covers you, the access fee is your share.

The provisional 2026 figures give a sense of the scale. The season produced 679,553 paid vouchers and 5,215,035 EUR, against about 5.4 million EUR in 2025. Of those, 316,099 titles (46.5 per cent) were bought at 5 EUR and 363,454 (53.5 per cent) at 10 EUR. The average chargeable day drew 11,326 payers, Saturdays about 13,661, with a peak of 25,471 on 2 May and a low of 7,441 on 29 April. Daily averages fell through the season, from 13,940 in May to 10,179 in June and 9,597 in July, and the daily average was 32.3 per cent below 2024. After running costs, 1,771,000 EUR was assigned to reducing the city's waste bill (VenetoNews, 2026). The measure remains contested locally, and the city was fined 10,000 EUR by the Italian data protection authority over how personal data was collected for it (VeneziaToday, 2025a).