St Mark's Basilica charges 10 EUR for admission on a booked time slot, and the ticket that opens everything costs 30 EUR. In between, the basilica with the Pala d'Oro is 20 EUR, the basilica with the museum and the Loggia dei Cavalli is 20 EUR, the museum and Loggia on their own are 14 EUR on Sunday mornings, and the bell tower is a separate 15 EUR (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a).
Entry for prayer remains free and needs no booking. Worshippers use the Porta dei Fiori on the north side of the church, off the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, and the basilica is open for prayer from 7.30am to 7.30pm every day (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026d). Paying visitors enter at the Porta San Pietro at a time fixed when they book, and that booked slot is the thing every skip-the-line product on the resale market is built around.
This page covers the ticket types and what each one opens, the hours on weekdays, Sundays and holy days, the bag rule that stops rucksacks at the door, what resellers are actually selling, and how the basilica combines with the bell tower and the Doge's Palace next door. All prices and hours below come from the Procuratoria's own ticket office pages, checked in October 2026.
Which St Mark's Basilica ticket to buy
Six tickets are sold to independent visitors at the Porta San Pietro: basilica admission at 10 EUR, basilica with the Pala d'Oro at 20 EUR, basilica with the museum and the Loggia dei Cavalli at 20 EUR, the museum and Loggia alone at 14 EUR on Sunday mornings only, the full ticket covering basilica, Pala d'Oro, museum and Loggia at 30 EUR, and the bell tower at 15 EUR (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a).
The basilica ticket is the base. Once inside, paying the relevant supplement lets you add the Pala d'Oro, the museum and the Loggia while the church is open, so a 10 EUR ticket is a decision you can revise at the door rather than a limit fixed at checkout (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a).
The official list sets out no separate booking or presale charge on top of these figures. Private visitors are described as receiving a standard 20 per cent discount on the ticket price, and further reductions of 50 per cent off the private price apply to minors between 10 and 18, students up to the age of 26 and visitors over 65. Groups of four and of five adults are also listed as discounted categories. Discounts cannot be combined, and none apply to the lit evening visits of the basilica and crypt, which are sold as group bookings in one-hour slots from about 7.30pm (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a).
St Mark's Basilica opening hours and the booked time slot
Monday to Saturday the basilica, the Pala d'Oro, the museum and the Loggia open at 9.30am, take their last admission at 4.45pm and close at 5.15pm (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026b).
Sundays and public holy days work differently. The basilica itself opens at 2pm, with the same 4.45pm last admission and 5.15pm closing, while the museum and the Loggia dei Cavalli open at 9.30am. From 9.30am to 2pm on a Sunday the museum is the only part open to visitors, because Mass is being celebrated in the church (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026b; Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026c). That is why the 14 EUR museum and Loggia ticket exists at all, and it is the only way to see the bronze horses and the terrace on a Sunday morning.
Admission to the basilica is permitted only during the booked slot, with a stated tolerance of about five minutes. The ticket office gives the example of a slot running from 10.00 to 10.30, where entry is allowed from 10.00 and you should be out by 10.35, so the visit is built around half an hour inside (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026c). Hours shift for celebrations, national holy days and occasions attended by the Patriarch of Venice, so the ticket office advises checking before travelling.
Is St Mark's Basilica free to enter?
For prayer, yes. The Procuratoria keeps the Porta dei Fiori on the north side of the church, in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, open for worshippers, and the basilica is open for prayer from 7.30am to 7.30pm daily. Mass is celebrated at 8am and 10am Monday to Saturday, with a further Mass at 6.45pm, and on Sundays and holy days of obligation at 8am, 10am, noon and 6.45pm (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026d). This is an entrance for people attending a service, with no ticket and no booked slot, and it does not include the Pala d'Oro, the museum or the Loggia.
Free admission as a visitor is also granted to a long list of categories: children under 11, accredited school groups and their accompanying adults, visitors with disabilities and their companions on presentation of a certificate, law enforcement officers with a badge, priests, monks and nuns, parish and pilgrim groups accompanied by clergy who have applied by email in advance, institutional guests, and accredited guides and group leaders holding a Procuratoria card.
Residents of the municipalities of the Diocese are admitted free to the basilica, the Pala d'Oro and the museum on showing an identity document at the gate: Caorle, Cavallino-Treporti, Eraclea, Jesolo, Mira, Quarto d'Altino and Venice, plus the parish of Cittanova. None of these exemptions covers the bell tower (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a).
What the Pala d'Oro, the Treasury and the museum hold
The Pala d'Oro stands behind the high altar and is the reason the 20 EUR and 30 EUR tickets exist. It measures 3.34 metres wide by 2.12 metres high, is divided into two parts, and carries about 250 cloisonne enamels on gilded silver sheet set among 1,927 precious stones and gems. The lower register dates from the early twelfth century, the upper panels with the Byzantine feasts probably arrived from Constantinople after 1204, and an inscription records the altarpiece being renewed in 1209 (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026e).
The Treasury occupies the old rooms between the church and the Doge's Palace, entered through a door in the southern transept. Its collection was assembled over more than nine centuries and runs from objects of about 400 BC to the 1960s. A fire on 13 January 1231 destroyed the room that held it and spared only four reliquaries sent from Constantinople in 1204, which still carry their Byzantine mountings (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026f). The ticket office currently sells no separate Treasury ticket (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a).
The museum, founded in the late nineteenth century, occupies the rooms above the narthex and the Doge's former Banqueting Hall. It holds the original four bronze horses, brought here after their last restoration, and the Pala feriale, the mid fourteenth-century painted panel once used to cover the Pala d'Oro (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026g). The Loggia dei Cavalli opens off it onto the facade, which is where the view over the Piazza comes from.
What skip-the-line tickets actually sell
The official 10 EUR ticket is already a timed entry. You pick a date and a slot on the Procuratoria's ticket office, you arrive at the Porta San Pietro within about five minutes of that time, and you are admitted (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026c). There is no cheaper unbooked queue to skip, and the official price list adds no presale fee (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a).
What a reseller sells is a different gate. Tour operators and licensed guides book at the Porta San Clemente, and they pay more than you would: 12 EUR for basilica entry, 24 EUR for basilica with the Pala d'Oro, 24 EUR for basilica with museum and Loggia, 36 EUR for the full ticket and 18 EUR for the bell tower (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a). A skip-the-line product priced at 35 EUR or more is that operator rate plus a margin, and often a guide or an audio commentary with it. The guiding may well be worth the difference. The queue avoidance is not, because you can book the same slot yourself.
Where a reseller's page and the Procuratoria disagree on a price or an opening time, the figures above from the official ticket office are the ones charged at the gate. Resale listings quoting a 3 EUR booking fee or a free unbooked entry for sightseeing are describing arrangements the current official price list no longer contains.
Bags, rucksacks and getting to the right door
Luggage does not come into the church. Suitcases and bulky rucksacks are refused at the gate, and the practical limit reported for bags carried in is around 40 by 30 by 20 centimetres (Europe for Visitors, 2026). The Procuratoria's own free deposit in the Ateneo San Basso, on the Piazzetta dei Leoncini beside the basilica, stopped operating: the diocesan paper reported San Basso dropping the luggage service when the ticketed-access system came in, with shops in the San Marco area taking it up instead (Gente Veneta, 2020). The current ticket office pages list no deposit at all, so the safe plan is to arrive carrying nothing larger than a small day bag and to leave the rest at a paid left-luggage office near the station or Piazzale Roma.
Dress for a working cathedral: covered shoulders and knees, hats off, phones silent. The basilica is a parish and a patriarchal seat as well as a monument, and visitor access can be suspended on particular days for reasons of worship (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026h).
Individual visitors queue at the Porta San Pietro, the door on the north side of the facade. Groups and guides use the Porta San Clemente at the southern end, and worshippers the Porta dei Fiori. Standing in the wrong line at the front of the facade is the most common way to lose a booked slot (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026a; Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026d).
Combining the basilica with the campanile and the Doge's Palace
The bell tower is sold separately at 15 EUR and no exemption covers it. It opens at 9.30am all year. From April to October last admission falls between 8pm and 8.30pm, closing at 9.15pm; from November to March last admission is between 6pm and 6.45pm, closing at 7.15pm, and times move with weather and events (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026b; Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026c). The tower you climb is the 1912 reconstruction of the 98.6 metre campanile that collapsed on 14 July 1902 (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026i).
There is no combined basilica and Doge's Palace ticket. The palace is run by the Musei Civici and sits inside the St Mark's Square Museums ticket at 35 EUR full and 15 EUR reduced, dropping to 30 EUR if booked at least 30 days ahead, which also covers the Correr, the Archaeological Museum and the Marciana library rooms. The wider Museum Pass is 50 EUR full and 25 EUR reduced and runs for six months. Palace hours are 9am to 7pm from April to October, last admission 6pm, and 9am to 6pm from November to March (Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).
The basilica ticket carries a quiet bonus. Within six months of purchase it admits you to Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello, the sacristy of the Salute, the Pinacoteca Manfrediniana and around forty other Venetian churches, and it gives free entry to The Home of The Human Safety Net in the Procuratie (Procuratoria di San Marco, 2026b).
