This page is the ticketing. For the collection itself — the Prisoners, the Gipsoteca, the panel paintings upstairs — see our Accademia Gallery guide, and Florence tours and tickets for how this fits with everything else you might book.

What Accademia Tickets Cost Now

The number to start from is €20, not €16. The Galleria dell’Accademia raised its standard admission on 1 February 2026, and a great deal of the advice still circulating online quotes the old price. If a page tells you the David costs sixteen euros, it was written before that date and you should treat everything else on it with the same caution.

Opening hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 08:15 to 18:50, with last entry half an hour before closing. Closed every Monday, plus 1 January and 25 December. State museums are free on the first Sunday of the month, which at the Accademia means a queue down Via Ricasoli and a tribune you can barely move in — the free day is a genuinely poor trade here, more so than at the Uffizi, because the whole visit is one room.

The Combined Tickets Nobody Mentions

Since 15 March 2026 the Accademia has been grouped administratively with the Bargello and three other museums, and the combined tickets that came with that arrangement are the best-value thing in Florentine museum pricing right now. Almost nobody buys them, because the booking page treats them as an afterthought.

Look at the second row for a moment. Six euros adds the Bargello — Donatello’s bronze David, Verrocchio, the two competition panels Ghiberti and Brunelleschi submitted for the Baptistery doors — to a ticket you were buying anyway. The Bargello on its own is one of the two or three best museums in Florence and it is reliably half-empty. If you are going to the Accademia at all, the €26 ticket is close to an automatic purchase.

The five-museum ticket at €38 is the serious art traveller’s option. It adds the Medici Chapels with Michelangelo’s New Sacristy, the strange upstairs sculpture gallery at Orsanmichele, and Palazzo Davanzati, which is the only place in the city that shows you what a wealthy fourteenth-century Florentine house actually looked like. Bought individually those five would run well past sixty euros.

How Far Ahead to Book

The Accademia sells out earlier than the Uffizi, which surprises people, and the reason is capacity. The Uffizi is an enormous building that can absorb a lot of visitors; the Accademia is a small gallery whose main event is one room, so the timed-slot allocation is much tighter.

• April to October: book roughly a month ahead. This is not caution — a fortnight out in June you will be choosing between 15:45 and nothing.
• March and November: a week to ten days.
• December to February, outside Christmas week: two or three days, and same-day slots often exist.
• Christmas and New Year: treat it as high season and book a month out.

Book through B-Ticket, the official Firenze Musei platform, or by telephone on +39 055 294883. Everything else is a reseller. The going rate on third-party sites is €32 to €45 for the same €24 ticket, and the ones marketed as “last-minute guaranteed David entry” are typically tour allocations being sold at a considerable premium.

Only got time for one big gallery? Our Uffizi versus Accademia comparison settles it in a page.

The Best and Worst Entry Slots

Because the visit is concentrated in a single space, the difference between a good slot and a bad one is far starker here than at a large museum. The same ticket buys either a quiet twenty minutes with one of the most famous objects on earth, or a scrum of raised phones.

Take 08:15 if you can get it. The first slot of the day is the whole strategy. Coach groups do not run that early, the tribune is genuinely quiet for the first half hour, and the north light through the skylight is at its best. By 10:00 the room has filled and stays full until mid-afternoon.

The second-best slot is the last hour, from around 17:30. Numbers thin sharply once the day-trip buses have left for Siena and Pisa, and although you are working against the clock, forty minutes is plenty for what is actually here.

Avoid 10:30 to 14:00, and avoid Tuesdays if you have any flexibility, because the Accademia inherits everyone whose Monday plans collapsed against the city’s Monday closures. Sunday afternoons are also worse than they look.

Finding the Door on Via Ricasoli

The entrance is on Via Ricasoli, the narrow straight street running north from the Duomo towards Piazza San Marco. There is no grand facade and no square in front of it — just a door in a wall with a queue along the pavement, which is why people walk past it.

There are two lines and they matter. One is for booked tickets with a time slot; the other is for people buying on the day. Look for the sign, ask if you cannot see one, and do not simply join the longer queue on the assumption that it is the real one. Arrive about ten minutes before your slot — earlier is not rewarded, and there is no shade on that pavement.

Practicalities: no large bags, and the cloakroom is small, so travel light. The gallery is step-free and there are lifts, though the tribune gets crowded enough that a wheelchair user will strongly prefer the first slot of the day — our Florence accessibility guide has the detail. Photography without flash is permitted.

Is €24 Worth It for One Statue?

Let us be honest about what this ticket is. The Accademia is not a great museum. It is a modest collection with one overwhelming object in it, and if the David were removed tomorrow the building would receive perhaps a fiftieth of its current visitors. Twenty-four euros and an hour of your morning for one sculpture is a real question, not a rhetorical one.

The answer is still yes, and the reason is scale. Every photograph you have ever seen of the David flattens it. In person it is 5.17 metres of marble on a two-metre plinth, the hands and head deliberately enlarged because Michelangelo carved it to be seen from far below on a cathedral buttress, and the effect of standing at its feet is not something the reproductions prepare you for. The veins on the lowered right hand, the tension across the neck, the fact that a twenty-six-year-old cut all of it from a single flawed block that two previous sculptors had abandoned — that lands in a way it does not on a page.

What is not worth it: going at midday, spending forty minutes in a queue, and getting eight minutes at the base of the plinth between other people’s cameras. That is the version most visitors buy, and it is where the complaints come from. The statue is worth €24. The midday scrum is not.

What Else Is in There

Three things justify the walk past the tribune, and all three are included in the same ticket.

The Prisoners — four unfinished figures Michelangelo abandoned for the tomb of Julius II — line the corridor leading up to the David, and a good many visitors march straight past them towards the famous one. They should not. These are blocks of marble with bodies half-emerged, chisel marks still visible, and they tell you more about how Michelangelo actually worked than the finished statue at the end ever will. Seen in the right order they turn the corridor into an argument about sculpture, which is presumably why they were placed there.

The Gipsoteca Bartolini is a long hall of nineteenth-century plaster models, densely packed, faintly eerie, and almost always empty. The musical instrument collection holds Medici commissions including instruments by Stradivari — a small room that people with any interest in music find genuinely absorbing and everyone else walks through in ninety seconds.

The statue itself — the commission, the flawed block, the 1873 move indoors — gets a full treatment in our guide to Michelangelo’s David.

Is a Guided David Tour Worth the Upgrade?

Guided Accademia visits run from about €45 to €75 per person, against a €24 ticket. So the question is whether the guiding is worth twenty to fifty euros.

For most people, no — and specifically for a reason peculiar to this museum. The Accademia is one room and one object. There is no complicated route to navigate, no risk of missing the highlight, and no context problem that twenty minutes of reading beforehand does not solve. Compare that with the Uffizi, where a guide genuinely earns their fee by steering you through ninety rooms to the fifteen paintings that matter.

What a guided visit does buy you is the group’s entry allocation, which can be real if the official site is sold out for your dates. That is a legitimate reason to book one. Just be clear that you are buying access, not expertise, and check the group size — thirty people around a headset in that tribune is a worse experience than going alone, not a better one.

The exception is a private guide with an art-historical background, at which point you are having a different kind of visit entirely and the Accademia is usually one stop of several. Our page on walking tours in Florence covers the operators worth talking to.

The Two Free Davids

Not everyone needs to pay. There are two full-size copies of the David standing in public in Florence, both free, both outdoors, and both in places you are likely to go anyway.

The marble copy in Piazza della Signoria stands where the original stood for 369 years, in front of the doorway it was carved as a political statement about. Seeing it there, at that scale against that rusticated wall, tells you something the tribune cannot — which is what the thing was actually for.

The bronze at Piazzale Michelangelo is greener, darker and stands in the middle of a coach park, but it comes with the best free view in the city attached — see our best views in Florence guide.

Is a copy enough? For a traveller on a tight budget with two days in Florence: honestly, quite possibly. You lose the surface — the polish, the veining, the tool marks — and you lose the scale illusion the tribune was built to produce. You keep the composition and the silhouette. If skipping the Accademia frees twenty-four euros and a morning for the Bargello, that is not a bad trade, and our Florence budget guide makes the case for several swaps like it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where to Go From Here

With the ticket booked, our Accademia Gallery guide walks the collection in order, and the Renaissance art guide gives you the context that makes the Prisoners corridor land. If the €26 combined ticket tempted you, the Bargello is ten minutes away on foot and is where a surprising number of visitors say they had their best hour in Florence.

Still assembling the trip? Florence museums covers what else deserves a booking, Uffizi tickets and Duomo tickets handle the other two bottlenecks, and the art lover’s itinerary strings them into a workable order.