Buckingham Palace Tour

Most pages about touring Buckingham Palace are written as though the Palace is a permanent attraction with a door you can walk through. It is not. For most of the year the interior is closed to the public entirely, and the thing nearly everyone actually experiences on Buckingham Palace Road is a ceremony that happens outside, on the pavement, for free.

This page answers the questions people are really asking — starting with whether you can get inside at all — and it says where every figure comes from. Where a fact is published by Royal Collection Trust or the Household Division, we name them. Where a widely-repeated figure has no primary source behind it, we say that too rather than reprint it with confidence it has not earned.

Where things stand (October 2026)

The 2026 State Rooms season ended on 27 September, and the interior is closed to general visitors until next summer. Royal Collection Trust says tickets for summer 2027 will be released in November. It had not published the 2027 dates when rct.uk was checked on 22 October 2026.

Between now and then there is one way inside. RCT’s East Wing Exclusive Guided Tour runs from 6 November 2026 to 31 January 2027 at £100 per person, and it is the only way to visit Buckingham Palace during the winter months. It is sold on rct.uk only. Outside, the Changing of the Guard carries on through the winter, The King’s Gallery is open daily and the Royal Mews opens Thursday to Monday (rct.uk, 22 October 2026). The winter guide puts them together into a morning.

For this autumn and winter the walk at the top of this page is the one to book. It starts by Green Park, passes the Palace, St James’s Palace and Clarence House, and finishes along Whitehall at Westminster Abbey, with the guard change on the days it happens and the Household Cavalry’s mounted guard at Horse Guards Parade, which changes daily. From $26, with 4,766 reviews (checked October 2026), and more new reviews in the past fortnight than any other Buckingham Palace tour.

Check dates for the guard-change walk

Can tourists tour Buckingham Palace?

Yes — 19 of the Palace’s State Rooms open to ticketed visitors each summer, and Royal Collection Trust lists the 2026 season as 9 July to 27 September. Through July and August the Palace opens seven days a week; in September it drops to Thursday–Monday, closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

That is the whole of general public access. Outside those eleven weeks, Royal Collection Trust’s own wording is that the Palace “only opens on selected dates for exclusive guided tours” — small groups, sold direct, in tiny numbers. The private apartments, where the Royal Family actually lives, are never open on any ticket in any season.

Two neighbours are far more available and get overlooked because they do not have “Palace” in the name: the Royal Mews, a working stable on Buckingham Palace Road that houses the 260-year-old Gold State Coach, and The King’s Gallery, which runs changing exhibitions from the Royal Collection. When rct.uk was checked on 22 October 2026 the Gallery was open daily and the Mews Thursday to Monday; both are separately ticketed.

Seasons shift. Confirm the current dates on rct.uk before you book flights — we would rather send you to the source than have you plan around a page that has gone stale.

What is the best tour to do of Buckingham Palace?

If your trip falls inside the summer opening, the best tour is a State Rooms entry ticket; at any other time of year it is a guided Changing of the Guard walk. The decision is made by the calendar, not by budget.

Inside the summer window, Royal Collection Trust sells its own standard ticket direct on rct.uk (£32 in advance). Every other State Rooms product walks the same route through the same rooms, because guides are not permitted inside the Palace. What changes is what is bundled around the entry (prices as listed in October 2026):

• State Rooms entry with a royal-London audio app — from $51
• State Rooms entry with a live guided walk past St James’s Palace, Clarence House and The Mall — from $93, with the guide handing you over at the door

Outside the summer window, none of that exists, and the honest recommendation flips entirely. A guided Changing of the Guard tour starts around $20 — the cheapest guided experience in royal London, and the one that still works in February. The walk at the top of this page, from $26, adds St James’s Palace, Clarence House, Whitehall and the outside of Westminster Abbey, and on the days the Guard does not change at the Palace there is still the mounted guard at Horse Guards Parade.

One option we cannot sell you and will point you at anyway: Royal Collection Trust’s East Wing Highlights Tour, which since July 2025 has included the first public access to the Centre Room — the room behind the famous balcony. It runs about an hour, is capped at 20 people, and is not for purchase or resale by third parties, with any such orders cancelled. It goes on sale on rct.uk first-come-first-served. There is no ballot, whatever you may have read.

Is the Buckingham Palace tour worth it?

Yes if you are interested in interiors, paintings and the machinery of state ceremony. No if you are hoping to see how the King actually lives. That is also the answer to whether it is worth it to do a Buckingham Palace tour rather than just standing outside: what you are buying is the formal half of the building, presented properly, not a glimpse of private life.

What is on the route: the Grand Staircase, the Throne Room, the White Drawing Room, the Ballroom, the Picture Gallery. The operator’s listing names Rembrandt and Rubens paintings, sculpture by Canova and Sèvres porcelain among the collection on display.

For 2026 there is a genuine reason to go that did not exist last year. Royal Collection Trust announced in July that the Picture Gallery has been rehung, with the number of paintings on display almost doubled from 63 to around 120 — including Rubens, Caravaggio and Zoffany — against new silk wall coverings and new lighting, a job it says took around 875 hours. Also new this season: a Rolls-Royce Phantom IV in the Grand Entrance Portico, and a garden information trail included with standard admission.

What you do not get, and should know before you pay:

• No live guide. Guides are not permitted inside; one operator says so plainly in its own listing.
• No photography. Royal Collection Trust states flatly that you cannot take photographs within the Palace. The garden on the way out is the exception, and it is where every visitor photograph you have seen was taken.
• No private apartments, ever.
• A queue. Multiple reviewers describe waiting around half an hour with a pre-booked ticket.

Reviewers are overwhelmingly positive but usefully specific. One recommends arriving much earlier than your slot for exactly that reason. Another notes that no map is included and the printed guidebook costs £7 on site. A third, travelling with children, singles out the separate children’s audio tour as the thing that made it work.

How much time do you need to tour Buckingham Palace?

Royal Collection Trust’s own published advice is to allow between two and two and a half hours. That is the figure to plan against, and it covers more than the rooms.

The part people do not expect is the exit. You do not leave through a door — the route out is a walk of roughly half a kilometre through the garden, on gravel. Comfortable shoes, and the only toilets and baby-care facilities on the route are down at that end.

Real visits land either side of RCT’s estimate. One recent reviewer reports doing the whole thing in an hour and a half without rushing; anyone who listens to every stop on the multimedia guide will use the full allowance. Then add the queue on top — around thirty minutes is the number reviewers keep repeating, and admission is in narrow timed slots with the listing stating plainly that late arrivals cannot be admitted. Arrive early, not on time.

If you add Royal Collection Trust’s East Wing Highlights Tour, RCT says that is about another hour on top.

What happens at 11am at Buckingham Palace?

The Changing of the Guard — the New Guard marches over from Wellington Barracks with a military band and formally relieves the Old Guard on the Palace forecourt. It is free, it needs no ticket, and it is the most reliable spectacle in royal London.

In the Household Division’s own words, the Old Guard forms up in front of the Palace and is relieved by the New Guard arriving from the barracks, accompanied by a band, in what it describes as a formal handover of responsibilities. The Guard is found by one of the five Foot Guards regiments, distinguishable by the buttons on their tunics and the plume in their bearskin caps. Soldiers begin gathering at Wellington Barracks and St James’s Palace from around 10:00 — the stage most visitors miss entirely — and the forecourt ceremony runs about 45 minutes.

Three things catch people out, and the third is the one nobody else will tell you:

1. It is not daily. The Household Division lists the King’s Guard change on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with Windsor changing Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. On non-change days the Guard is still inspected at 15:00, and Sundays have a Parade at 10:00 instead.
2. It gets cancelled. The Household Division states that ceremonial activity can be altered or cancelled at very short notice, especially in wet weather, and that the decision can be made as late as 10:45 on the day. One reviewer of a guard-change tour in June 2026 records missing the ceremony to a heatwave.
3. The official start time is genuinely ambiguous. The Household Division’s own page carries 11am in its header, its homepage slider says 10:30 at Wellington Barracks and 11:00 at the Palace, and the “How to Watch” text on that same page says the ceremony takes place in front of the Palace at 10:45. That is a real inconsistency in the primary source, not a misreading of it. Treat 10:45 as your deadline to be in position; if you turn up at 11:00 you have turned up late.

Our full guide to the ceremony covers where to stand, what a guide adds for about $20, and why the guided operators deliberately avoid the forecourt.

And how much does a Buckingham Palace tour cost?

As listed in October 2026: State Rooms entry with an audio app from $51, the ticket-plus-guided-walk combination at $93, a guided guard-change tour from $20, and the ceremony itself for nothing.

At the gate, Royal Collection Trust sells in pounds. Standard adult admission for the 2026 season is £32 booked in advance, £35 on the day, with reduced rates for 18–24s and children, free entry for under-5s (a ticket is still required), and a £1 ticket scheme for visitors receiving qualifying UK benefits. The add-ons and combinations are published clearly: the Garden Highlights Tour at £15 per adult, which has to be booked together with a State Rooms ticket rather than bought on its own — about £47 all in for the pair; the guided East Wing Tour at £90 per adult; and the Royal Day Out covering the State Rooms, The King’s Gallery and the Royal Mews at £65.70 for an adult in advance, with Young Person (18–24) at £42.70 and Child (5–17) at £32.80.

Those pound figures were read at source on rct.uk on 1 August 2026. Royal Collection Trust does change prices between seasons, and its 2027 prices had not been published when rct.uk was checked on 22 October 2026, so check before budgeting. Full ladder on our tickets page.

And one reason to skip us entirely. Royal Collection Trust lets you convert a ticket into a 1-Year Pass — twelve months of free re-admission — by asking for your purchase to be treated as a donation. Its terms say tickets booked through a tour operator or ticket agent cannot be converted. So if the 1-Year Pass matters to you, or if you need a step-free access route or a complimentary companion ticket, buy direct from rct.uk instead of through this page. All three are direct-only.

The building itself, briefly

Buckingham Palace has 775 rooms — royal.uk breaks that down as 19 State Rooms, 52 royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices and 78 bathrooms — across a front 108 metres wide, 120 metres deep and 24 metres high.

It has been the official London residence of the sovereign since 1837, when Queen Victoria became the first monarch to live there. The building you photograph is the work of three architects in sequence: John Nash turned Buckingham House into a palace for George IV, doubling its size in Bath stone and being dismissed for overspending; Edward Blore finished the job by 1847 and extended the east façade; and Sir Aston Webb refaced the front in Portland stone in 1913 — twelve months to prepare the stone, thirteen weeks to fit it — because Blore’s softer French stone had rotted in London soot. The forecourt where the Guard changes was formed in 1911, as part of the Victoria Memorial scheme.

The flag tells you whether anyone is home. royal.uk is explicit: the Royal Standard flies only when the Sovereign is present, and if the Union Flag is flying instead, the King is not in residence. (The claim that the Union Flag only started flying in the monarch’s absence after 1997 is widely repeated but we could not find it on royal.uk — treat it as reported, not official.)

Since 2017 the Palace has been under a £369 million, ten-year reservicing programme replacing wiring, plumbing and heating, due to complete in 2027. It was designed so the building stays occupied and operational throughout, and the summer opening has run every year regardless. We found no announcement of visitor-route closures for 2026 — though on a live building site, absence of an announcement is not a guarantee.

Getting there

Royal Collection Trust lists four Underground stations as the nearest — Victoria, Green Park, St James’s Park and Hyde Park Corner, all roughly a ten-minute walk. It gives one blanket figure rather than per-station times, so treat anything more precise as somebody’s estimate. Green Park is the step-free station and much the nicest approach: out of the station, down through the park, across the front of the Palace. Victoria is the National Rail interchange and where the luggage storage is — which matters, because oversized bags are refused at the door. St James’s Park is closest to the Wellington Barracks end of Birdcage Walk, where the Guard forms up.

Security is airport-style and stricter than most visitors expect: a maximum bag size of 45 × 20 × 30 cm, carried at your side rather than on your back, with suitcases refused outright. Knives, scissors, long umbrellas and aerosols are checked in; bicycles, scooters, skateboards and drones are not admitted at all. Pushchairs cannot go into the State Rooms and are checked in at the door, though baby carriers and hip seats can be borrowed free subject to availability. The visitor rules page has the full list, dress code included.

So what should you actually book?

Prices, ratings and review counts from GetYourGuide, checked October 2026. Operators price by season, so treat them as the shape of the market, not a quote.

• Travelling next summer? Summer 2027 tickets go on sale on rct.uk in November. Once the dates are out, book a State Rooms ticket for a timed slot, arrive well before it, and give the visit two and a half hours.
• Travelling any other week of the year? The interior is shut. Build the morning around the Changing of the Guard and add the Royal Mews or The King’s Gallery, which are open far more of the year.
• Choosing between this and Windsor? Windsor Castle opens Thursday to Monday most of the year. Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle settles it by season.
• Want a person explaining royal London, not just the rooms? The ticket-plus-guided-walk combination is the $93 tier — just know the guide stops at the door.
• On a tight budget? The ceremony costs nothing, and a $20 guided guard-change walk is the best value on this whole site.
• Actually after the Crown Jewels? Those are not here — they are at the Tower of London, a separate ticket and a separate morning. toweroflondontourwithbeefeater.com covers those tours in detail, including which ones actually get you to the Jewel House before the queue builds.

How these facts were checked

Written 1 August 2026 for the 2026 summer season and updated 22 October 2026 for the winter: the end of the 2026 season, the November release of summer 2027 tickets, the East Wing Exclusive Guided Tour (6 November 2026 – 31 January 2027, £100) and the Royal Mews and King’s Gallery opening days are from rct.uk, read that day. Figures were verified against primary sources where primary sources exist, and are flagged where they do not:

• State Rooms 2026 dates (9 July – 27 September) and the July/August-daily versus September-Thursday-to-Monday pattern come from rct.uk’s Buckingham Palace visit page and its 8 July 2026 press release.
• “Allow 2 to 2½ hours”, the half-kilometre garden exit walk, the photography ban, the pushchair rule and the 45 × 20 × 30 cm bag limit are quoted from Royal Collection Trust’s own practical-information page.
• The Picture Gallery re-hang (63 → ~120 paintings, ~875 hours), the Rolls-Royce Phantom IV and the new garden trail are from RCT’s 8 July 2026 press release.
• East Wing Highlights Tour details — about an hour, capped at 20, not for third-party resale, running again in 2026 — are from RCT’s own 2026 event page and press release. There is no ballot.
• Changing of the Guard days, the 45-minute duration, the wet-weather cancellation clause and the 10:45 decision deadline are from householddivision.org.uk. The 11:00 versus 10:45 contradiction is on that same official page, and we have reported it rather than picked a side. The minute-by-minute stage timings circulating online come from ceremony-tracking sites, not the Household Division.
• That the ceremony is free and unticketed is universally reported and consistent with the Household Division’s page, which mentions no ticketing of any kind — but the official page never uses the word “free”, so we are telling you the basis.
• 775 rooms, the room breakdown, the building dimensions, 1837, Nash / Blore / Webb, the 1911 forecourt and the Royal Standard protocol are all from royal.uk. The post-1997 flag change is secondary and labelled as such.
• The £369m reservicing programme is from royal.uk, with progress figures from the National Audit Office’s July 2024 report.
• RCT’s pound prices are primary-source verified, read on rct.uk / tickets.rct.uk and re-confirmed 1 August 2026: standard adult admission £32 in advance, £35 on the day; the Garden Highlights Tour £15 per adult as an add-on that must be booked with a State Rooms ticket, not as a standalone ticket; the East Wing Tour £90 per adult; and the Royal Day Out £65.70 adult, with Young Person (18–24) £42.70 and Child (5–17) and disabled rates at £32.80. RCT revises prices between seasons, so confirm before booking. Named viewing spots and arrival times for the ceremony are crowd-sourced travel advice; no official source endorses any of them.
• Tour prices, ratings, review counts, inclusions and reviewer quotes come from the tour listings, captured in 2026, and change over time.

Opening dates, prices and security rules change without notice, and Royal Collection Trust and the Household Division announce on their own schedules. Confirm on rct.uk and householddivision.org.uk before you book flights.