Free Museums in New York: Days and Free Hours

New York is an expensive city, and so are its museum tickets. The good news is there are ways to pay less. For example, there are several free museums in New York, others where you can pay what you want (pay as you wish), and a number that have free days or hours with free or reduced admission.

Below I'll walk you through which New York museums are free or offer reduced admission so you can save some money (you can also read more tips for saving money in New York here).

That said, to make the most of free or reduced museum admission you need to plan ahead. For starters, I recommend checking each institution's website in advance, where you'll find the current process for getting in free. I say this because most of them require booking tickets ahead of time.

It's also important to keep in mind that when general museum admission is free, that doesn't necessarily include access to special exhibitions or events. If those interest you, you'd have to pay extra.

How to get into NYC museums for free

To take advantage of free museum admission you'll need to plan carefully. Many free days and time slots overlap, so you'll have to choose.

Let me remind you again how useful discount tourist cards like the New York Pass, GO City, or the City Pass can be, since they include admission to most of the major museums.

To help you plan, I've organized this guide to New York's free museums like this:

1. Free New York Museums, the ones you can always enter for free.
2. New York museums with a suggested price, the ones that let you pay whatever you think is fair (pay-what-you-wish)
3. Museums in each New York borough with a day or time slot offering free admission, reduced price, or suggested price.

Free museums in New York

There are New York museums that are completely free, genuinely free. Admission is free any day of the week. Here's a selection of the standouts:

• The Skyscraper Museum: a one-of-a-kind museum covering the history of how these Manhattan titans were built.
• Federal Hall National Memorial: the former Congress building where George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States. It's a memorial that tells that story, and its statue is one of the most photographed on Wall Street.
• National Museum of the American Indian: a museum devoted to the cultural diversity and legacy of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, from Patagonia to Alaska.
• The Immigration Museum: when you buy your ferry ticket to the Statue of Liberty, you get free access to the Ellis Island Museum.
• American Folk Art Museum: crafts and artistic expressions that reflect American folk traditions.
• The Bronx Museum of the Arts: focused on contemporary urban art, including graffiti.
• Yeshiva University Museum: dedicated to exhibiting and preserving Jewish art and culture.
• Socrates Sculpture Park: a park in Queens with outdoor sculptures, and also a great viewpoint over Manhattan.
• Snug Harbor Cultural Center: you can visit its beautiful gardens on Staten Island for free.

New York museums with a suggested price

Several New York museums use a «suggested price» for admission and accept the «pay what you want» model (pay as you wish).

Pay as you wish was designed for city residents and for people who genuinely can't afford the ticket.

Plenty of New Yorkers think tourists should pay, since if you could afford the flight and the hotel, how can you not afford the tickets? (The Met and the American Museum of Natural History, for example, dropped «pay as you wish» for tourists after the pandemic.)

In my opinion, you should pay, because these cultural institutions use ticket revenue to keep running (the New York Pass, GO New York, and City Pass discount cards are a way to save and still support the museums).

How much to pay is up to you, so here's the list of museums that still offer that freedom:

• MoMA PS1
• Brooklyn Museum
• El Museo del Barrio
• Queens Museum
• Staten Island Museum

New York museums with free or reduced hours

Several of New York's most important museums have one day a month, one day a week, or a specific time slot with free or reduced admission.

After the pandemic, museums got used to asking visitors to grab free or reduced-price tickets online in advance on their websites.

These free tickets can sell out, so check the official websites carefully to understand how it works and book your free tickets as soon as they're released.

As you can see, it takes planning, so if you're traveling on a tight schedule, I'd think twice.

But if you're like me and visit New York whenever you can, taking advantage of free museum hours and days is a great way to keep exploring the city's cultural gems. On every trip I manage to get into some new place for free 😉.

Below I've organized the museums in each New York borough that offer free, reduced, or suggested admission on a certain day or time of the week or month.

Apologies if anything has changed, but museums update these free hours pretty often! That's why I recommend checking the official websites too.

Manhattan museums

• Guggenheim Museum New York: on Saturdays between 5 pm and 8 pm, you can pay as little as $1. In the post I explain how to get these reduced-price tickets.
• Museum of the City of New York: free every Wednesday (all day)
• Frick Collection: pay what you want on Thursdays between 4 pm and 6 pm.
• Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum: free the first Friday of every month between 5 pm and 9 pm.
• Neue Galerie: free the first Friday of every month between 5 pm and 8 pm.
• Whitney Museum of American Art: free the first Friday of every month between 6 pm and 9 pm.
• International Center of Photography (ICP): pay what you want every Thursday between 6 pm and 9 pm ($5 minimum).
• Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum: pay what you want every day between 5 pm and 6 pm.
• Museum of Jewish Heritage: free admission on Thursdays from 4 pm to 8 pm.

Brooklyn Museums

• Brooklyn Museum: Free the first Saturday of every month from 5 pm to 11 pm.
• Brooklyn Botanic Garden: Free on certain days (they change often)

Queens Museums

• Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI): Pay what you wish the first Friday of every month.
• Noguchi Museum: Free the first Friday of every month from 10 am to 5 pm.

Bronx Museums

• New York Botanical Garden: Pay what you wish on Wednesdays.
• Bronx Zoo: Free on Wednesdays (you have to reserve your ticket online, I explain the details at the link)

Discounted Tickets to New York Museums

If you're planning to visit a lot of museums, a good way to save is to buy the New York Pass discount card or GO City, which may work out more flexible if you have more days.

That card includes admission to most of the city's museums, so the savings are significant, and you can visit at your own pace without being tied to the museums' tight free-admission windows, skipping long lines along the way.

If you only want to visit the Met, the American Museum of Natural History, the 9/11 Memorial Museum and the Guggenheim New York, the New York CityPASS will do the job. It gets you into 5 New York attractions at 40% off.

Keep in mind that nearly every museum offers reduced admission for visitors under 18, students and seniors (and several give teachers a discount too!), so bring your ID every time you visit to take advantage.

Buy Ticket Bundles

There are other ways to pay less, like buying ticket bundles on the Tiqets platform. In some cases the savings are substantial.

Another advantage of Tiqets is that for a little extra you can cancel your tickets for free and get a full refund if your plans change, something you can't do with tickets bought directly from the attractions.

And look, if you do have to pay, pay with confidence. New York's museums are worth every penny 😃.