Doge's Palace

How much are Doge's Palace tickets in 2026?

There is no ticket for the Doge's Palace on its own. Admission is sold as the St Mark's Square Museums ticket, valid for the palace, the Correr Museum, the National Archaeological Museum of Venice and the Monumental Rooms of the Marciana National Library. The standard price is 35 EUR full and 15 EUR reduced. Buying online at least 30 days before the visit date lowers the full price to 30 EUR, while the reduced price stays at 15 EUR (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). The MUVE app audio guide is included, in six languages.

The reduced rate covers children aged 6 to 14, students aged 15 to 25, visitors over 65, and holders of the Rolling Venice or ISIC card. Two adults travelling with at least one person up to 16 all pay the reduced rate. Admission is free for children aged 0 to 5, Venetian residents, ICOM members, disabled visitors with a companion and Italian-licensed tourist guides. School groups pay 5.50 EUR per person between 1 September and 15 March.

The Museum Pass costs 50 EUR full and 25 EUR reduced and adds the rest of the civic museums, among them Ca' Rezzonico, Ca' Pesaro, the Glass Museum on Murano and the Lace Museum on Burano. It runs for six months, allows one entry to each museum and needs no reservation. The Clock Tower is excluded.

Doge's Palace opening hours and last admission

From 1 April to 31 October the palace opens 09:00 to 19:00, with last admission at 18:00. From 1 November to 31 March it opens 09:00 to 18:00, with last admission at 17:00 (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). Closing procedures start 30 minutes before the stated closing time, so a visitor arriving at last admission has roughly half an hour on the route before rooms begin to shut. The published hours show no weekly closing day.

From Friday 1 May to Saturday 26 September 2026 the palace and the Correr Museum stay open until 23:00 every Friday and Saturday, with last admission at 22:00. That doubles the usable length of those two days and is the only scheduled chance to see the institutional chambers after dark. Outside the published hours, an after-hours visit can be requested at least five working days in advance, subject to availability.

Extraordinary changes are posted in the announcements section of the museum's own site rather than by ticket resellers, so it is worth a look in the week you travel.

Avoiding the queue: the noon rule and what you cannot bring in

The rule that decides how long you wait is the entry time slot. Holders of a St Mark's Square Museums ticket without a specific entry time are admitted to the Doge's Palace only from 12:00 onwards (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). A ticket carrying a morning slot is therefore worth more than a cheaper open one if you want the building before midday, and the 09:00 opening is only useful to you if your ticket is timed.

The public entrance is the Porta del Frumento, under the portico of the fourteenth-century facade on Piazzetta San Marco; visitors leave through the Porta della Carta at the far end of the courtyard. Bags and rucksacks may be checked on the way in.

Suitcases, trolleys and any luggage whose three sides add up to more than one linear metre, handles, wheels and outside pockets included, are refused at the door, and there is nowhere at the museum to leave them, so they have to be deposited elsewhere first. Medium bags, backpacks and umbrellas go in the cloakroom, which is free. Groups of more than ten people who are not on an organised tour must hire whisper audio equipment at the desk, at one euro per person. Anyone booked on a guided tour who turns up more than fifteen minutes after the departure time is excluded from it.

What you see inside: the visitor route

The route does not follow the floors in order: it climbs and descends, crossing them several times. It begins in the Museo dell'Opera, six ground-floor rooms holding original carved capitals taken off the arcades during the restoration launched in 1876, when 42 of the worst-decayed ones were replaced on the building by copies. It then crosses the courtyard, where the Giants' Staircase rises towards colossal statues of Mars and Neptune carved by Sansovino in 1565, and climbs through the loggia past the bocche di leone, the slots through which anonymous denunciations were posted from the late sixteenth century.

The institutional chambers fill the first and second floors: the rooms of the Great Council, the Senate, the Collegio, the Council of Ten and the Quarantie. The Chamber of the Great Council is 53 metres long and 25 metres wide and held meetings of between 1,200 and 2,000 patricians. Behind the doge's throne hangs the Paradiso, one of the longest canvases in the world, painted by Jacopo Tintoretto and his workshop between 1588 and 1592 to replace Guariento's fresco of 1365 to 1368, whose damaged remains are shown in the neighbouring Guariento Room. A frieze below the ceiling carries portraits of the first 76 doges. The visit finishes with the armoury, which still holds over 2,000 pieces, the picture gallery with works by Bellini, Carpaccio, Titian and Tiepolo, and the prisons (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).

The Bridge of Sighs and the New Prisons

The Bridge of Sighs was built in 1614 to link the palace to the New Prisons on the other side of the canal. It is enclosed on all sides and holds two parallel corridors: the one visitors use today connected the prisons to the chambers of the Magistrato alle Leggi and the Quarantia Criminal, the other to the State Advocacy rooms and the Parlatorio. The name dates from the Romantic period and was meant to evoke prisoners glimpsing the lagoon and San Giorgio through the small windows on the way from courtroom to cell (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).

The New Prisons were begun in the mid-sixteenth century to hold prisoners in larger and better-lit cells than the palace itself could offer, and the building counts among the earliest purpose-built standalone state prisons in Europe. After the first floor you can turn back over the bridge or carry on down through two lower levels and the prison courtyard, past a cell displaying buglioli, the lidded buckets used for waste.

Crossing the bridge is included in the standard ticket, so it needs no separate booking. The prisons and the armoury are not accessible to wheelchair users; the rest of the standard route is, and the ground-floor toilets are accessible.

Secret Itineraries and the Doge's Hidden Treasures

Two guided routes sit outside the standard ticket. Both cost 40 EUR full and 20 EUR reduced, both last about an hour and a quarter, and the price includes unguided entry afterwards to the palace, the Correr Museum, the National Archaeological Museum and the Marciana rooms. Reservation is required for both.

The Secret Itineraries tour starts in the courtyard and passes through a narrow door into the Pozzi, the damp ground-floor cells, then climbs to the offices of the ducal notary, the Great Chancellor and the Secret Chancellery, enters the torture chamber, and reaches the Piombi, the cells under the lead roof reserved for prisoners of the Council of Ten. Both cells occupied by Casanova, now reconstructed, are on the route. It crosses the attic and drops into the Chamber of the Inquisitors, a magistracy created in 1539 whose ceiling was painted by Tintoretto in 1566 and 1567. Groups run from 2 to 25 people, in English at 10:00, 11:30 and 13:00 (the 13:00 departure moves to 09:30 from 15 June to 31 August), in Italian at 11:00 and 12:30, and in French at 10:30 and 12:00.

The Doge's Hidden Treasures tour takes at most 10 people through the Porta della Carta, the Terrazza Foscara, the Loggia Foscara, the armoured Sala dei Forzieri, the Doge's Terrace and Apartment, past Titian's 1523 fresco of St Christopher, to the Chiesetta and Antichiesetta. English departures are at 11:00 and 16:00. Neither tour admits children under 6, and neither suits visitors with mobility problems.

Getting there, and what is on in 2026

The address is San Marco 1, and the public entrance is the Porta del Frumento on Piazzetta San Marco. The nearest vaporetto stops are Vallaresso and San Zaccaria on line 1, Giardinetti on line 2, and San Zaccaria on lines 4.1 and 5.1, all reachable from Piazzale Roma and from Santa Lucia railway station; from the Lido, take line 1 or line 5.2 (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). A single 75-minute Rete Unica ticket on the ACTV waterborne network costs 9.50 EUR, so a day or multi-day card is worth pricing up if the palace is one of several stops (ACTV, 2026).

Palazzo Ducale is the most visited of the civic museums. The foundation reported over 1.3 million visitors to the palace in 2025, out of more than 2.4 million across the network, with Italians making up 23.1 per cent of the palace's audience and visitors from the United States 19.7 per cent (Askanews, 2026).

The exhibition Etruschi e Veneti. Acque, culti e santuari runs at the palace from 6 March to 29 September 2026 and is covered by the museum ticket. One work on the standard route is away: Veronese's The Rape of Europa is under restoration, a reproduction hangs in its usual place, and the conservation work on the original can be watched in the Liago Room.