Forbidden City Tickets: How Foreigners Book by Passport 2026

You can’t buy a Forbidden City ticket at the gate. The Palace Museum, which runs the palace, sells no tickets on the day of your visit: you book online with your passport number, and each date goes on sale at 20:00 Beijing time, seven days before, which is noon GMT. Admission is ¥60 from 1 April to 31 October and ¥40 from 1 November to 31 March (about $9 or £7 at the higher price), the museum lets in no more than 40,000 visitors a day, and it’s closed on Mondays except national holidays. All of this was checked on the museum’s own sites on 6 October 2026.

The harder part is what to do once your date has sold out. Waiting for someone to cancel won’t help: in August 2024 the museum told Beijing Daily that refunded tickets don’t go back into the pool, so touts can’t grab tickets and resell them through refunds. What does help is knowing how the evening release works, and which fallbacks are real.

Booking night, step by step

The museum’s booking site, bookingticket.dpm.org.cn, works in English, and the visit pages at intl.dpm.org.cn link to it. Book there or in the museum’s own mini programme: its notice says no third party is authorised to sell its tickets.

1. Make an account before the night. It’s created once you’ve verified your email address, so do it a day early, not at 19:58.
2. Pick the date and the session. The booking page splits the day in two: morning tickets must be checked by 12:00, and afternoon ticket checks start at 11:00.
3. Enter each visitor’s passport details. Foreign visitors have to give a passport number, each passport can hold one ticket per visiting day, and you’ll need the passport you booked with at the gate. If you’re renewing yours before the trip, book on the new one.
4. Add the two extra galleries, if they appeal. The Treasure Gallery, in the Palace of Tranquil Longevity, and the Gallery of Clocks, in the Hall for Ancestral Worship, cost ¥10 each and go on sale on the same schedule. Their last entry is 16:10 from April to October and 15:40 in winter, ten minutes after the palace’s own. Until 1 November 2026 the Hall of Literary Brilliance also shows Song-dynasty calligraphy and painting, the second half of a Tang and Song exhibition, which needs no extra ticket but must be reserved, through the museum’s WeChat mini programme according to the city government.
5. Pay. The site takes international bank cards as well as WeChat Pay and Alipay, and its payment step also lists a third option, “Apply for on-site payment”; the mobile wallets are worth setting up anyway, and the payments guide covers how.

On timing, two things from the museum itself are worth knowing. In July 2023 it said tickets were selling out around 21:00, so a date stayed open for roughly an hour, and it advised against booking on the stroke of 20:00. A year later it described releasing tickets by hand in batches through the evening, partly to give overseas visitors on its multilingual site time to book; visitors told Beijing Daily that around 20:40 was a good moment to try. If you’re booking from home, 20:00 in Beijing is 12:00 GMT: 13:00 in London and 8:00 in New York while the clocks are on summer time, 12:00 and 7:00 in winter.

Cancelling or changing your mind

Tickets are final: once one’s sold, its date, session and ticket type stay fixed, so moving means cancelling and booking again. Cancel through the channel you booked with before midnight on the day before your visit and it’s simply refunded. Later than that, including on the day itself (a whole order can be cancelled until 20:00), the museum logs a missed booking against you. It logs at most one a day, and three in 180 days stop you booking any tickets for the next 60 days. Refunds reach your card within five working days, and a ticket that’s been scanned at the gate isn’t refunded at all.

Prices and hours for 2026

Free tickets go to under-18s who are Chinese citizens, a group that includes residents of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and foreigners with permanent residence in China; they still have to be booked. Children on other foreign passports aren’t in that group, and the museum’s price list has no separate child fare, so book each of them a standard ticket. Under-14s must come with an adult, and one adult can bring up to three of them. Full-time students over 18, up to undergraduate level, pay ¥20 in either season with a student card and a letter from their school. Visitors aged 60 and over get half price on the original of their ID card; the rule doesn’t mention passports, so if you’re counting on it, ask the museum before you book, on its ticket line, 400-950-1925 (08:00-20:00 Beijing time), or at gugong@dpm.org.cn, the email address on its English site.

When your date has sold out

Work down this list in order. Holiday dates sell out first, and our Chinese New Year 2027 guide covers the eve closure and how the museum announces its holiday hours.

Don’t wait for cancellations. As above, the museum said in 2024 that refunded tickets don’t go back into the pool, so refreshing the booking page on the day before is likely wasted effort.

Try the other session. Before giving up on a date, check whether it’s only the morning that’s gone; the afternoon tickets are checked from 11:00.

Move the palace, not the trip. The museum is open six days a week, and the Great Wall isn’t bound by its timetable. Swap your Wall day with your palace day and you buy another evening’s release; our comparison of Mutianyu and Badaling covers both sections, open daily, including Mondays.

Book a guided group tour that includes admission. The museum keeps travel agencies’ tickets in a separate pool from individual visitors’, and licensed agencies book group tickets through their own account on its website, so a tour can have places when the individual release has gone. A “ticket only” from an agent is a different thing: the museum authorises no third-party ticket sales, and in 2023 it warned that ticket-grabbing services lead to mark-ups, refusals to refund and, sometimes, no entry.

Know about the window, but don’t plan on it. In August 2024 the museum said it could issue same-day tickets at its window to overseas visitors who had trouble booking or paying online. Its booking rules still say it doesn’t sell tickets on the day, and the on-site payment option in step 5 comes at the end of a booking, after you’ve picked a date with tickets left, so neither is a way round a sold-out date.

See it from above. If all of that fails, Jingshan, the hill straight across from the palace’s north gate, looks down over the whole complex; the Beijing guide has its price and the walk on from there.

Getting in: the Meridian Gate, and Tiananmen in front of it

Everyone goes in at the same gate. Since 2 July 2011 the palace has run a one-way route from south to north: you enter by the Meridian Gate, the south gate, and leave by the Gate of Divine Prowess to the north or the East Prosperity Gate (Donghuamen). Expect a security check first and then a face-recognition ticket gate, so have the passport you booked with in your hand.

Which way you walk in depends on what you’ve booked. With a palace ticket only, the museum’s booking notice sends you along the east or west moat road to the Meridian Gate. If you’ve also booked Tiananmen Square, you can go through the square’s security checkpoints and on through the Duanmen gate, timing it to your palace session; that passage is open Tuesday to Sunday, 8:00-16:00, and closed all day on Mondays. The nearest metro stations are Tiananmen East and Tiananmen West on Line 1, and the museum has no car park of its own, so come by public transport.

Tiananmen Square has its own real-name booking, one to seven days ahead, on the Tiananmen Square reservation platform; that’s also how you get a place at the dawn flag-raising (06:14 on 5 October 2026). Visitors who turn up on the wrong date are sent away, and you’ll need your passport there too.

What’s closed in autumn 2026

On 6 October 2026 one closure stood out. The Gate of Supreme Harmony, which faces you across the courtyard inside the Meridian Gate, has been closed for building work since 3 August 2026; the museum’s notice of 31 July gave no reopening date. Smaller halls shut for a few weeks at a time for upkeep: in 2026 the museum closed the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity for June, and the Yanxi Palace for a survey in September and October. It posts these on its Chinese notices page, so check it the evening you book.

Where the palace fits in your Beijing days

Because sales open only a week ahead, you’ll probably be booking from home in the week before you fly, so set a reminder for 20:00 Beijing time seven days before your palace day. Our 10-day and two-week China itinerary puts the palace on day 2 with the Temple of Heaven in the morning, and the Beijing guide carries the afternoon on from Jingshan to the lakes at Houhai. Still sorting out entry? Start with whether you need a visa for China.