Budapest Parliament Tour: How to Actually Get Tickets in 2026

If you want to tour the Hungarian Parliament, there’s one official place to buy an advance ticket: jegymester.hu, the booking site run for the Office of the National Assembly. Book there, book early, and read the date twice before you pay.

I toured the building on my first visit to Budapest in September 2026, and I managed to waste one ticket, queue outside the Visitor Centre at half past seven in the morning, and pay for the whole thing twice. I’ve been a professional travel photographer and blogger since 2010, and this is one of the more awkward tickets I’ve ever bought. It’s also a tour I’m happy to recommend, once you’ve got over the ticketing hurdle.

If you’re visiting from outside Europe, the ticket comes to HUF 14,749 with the booking fee, and the calendar will probably tell you it’s sold out when you first look. Sold out usually isn’t the end of it, though.

 

Quick Answer: How to Get Budapest Parliament Tour Tickets

1. Buy your ticket on jegymester.hu, the official seller. You pick a date, a time slot and a language. A standard adult ticket is HUF 7,000 if you’re an EEA citizen and HUF 14,000 if you’re not, plus a booking fee of HUF 749 on the dearer ticket. US, UK, Canadian and Australian visitors all pay the higher rate.
2. Check the date before you pay. Tickets are non-refundable, and you can only move a booking to a slot that still has space.
3. If your dates aren’t on the calendar yet, they haven’t been released. When I looked at the end of October 2026, the calendar ran to the end of December.
4. If your dates are there but sold out, keep checking as the day gets close. I saw slots come back at short notice twice, once for that same day and once for the next day. The fallback is the same-day queue at the Visitor Centre ticket office on Kossuth tér, which sells a limited number of tickets from 8am.
5. If your dates are sold out and you can’t gamble on a last-minute slot or an early queue, book through a reseller like GetYourGuide. It’s the same audioguide tour and it costs more, but you get a confirmed ticket and free cancellation up to 24 hours before.

Print your ticket, turn up at the Visitor Centre 15 minutes before your slot, go through security, and you’ll be inside for about 45 minutes.

 

How I Actually Got Tickets (After Wasting One)

We first looked months ahead, and couldn’t book at all, because the dates we wanted weren’t on the calendar yet. Then we looked a few weeks out, and every slot was gone. I put it down as something we’d probably miss.

On the morning we were travelling to Budapest, I checked again from Vienna and got a bit over-excited, because a 1pm tour had appeared. I bought it on the spot. Then I looked at the confirmation and realised I’d booked it for 1pm that same day, while I was still 150 miles away in another country and not due into Budapest until 1.30pm.

Of course, you can normally change a Parliament booking yourself on the ticket site, but only to another slot that still has tickets, and there weren’t any (there usually aren’t). The change option then timed out, because changes close three hours before the tour starts. The ticket was non-refundable. So that was HUF 14,749 gone, on a mistake I don’t intend to make twice (I hope).

Plan B was the same-day queue. The Visitor Centre ticket office sells a limited number of tickets for that day from 8am, so the next morning I joined the line at 7.30am. There were four people ahead of me. By 7.40am there were about 60 people behind me! So you really do need to be early. While I was standing there the flag-raising ceremony happened in the square, which was a nice bonus for an early start.

Then the man in front of me suddenly left, saying he’d just picked up tickets for the next day online. I got my phone out, and he was right: the next day had slots again. I’d probably have got a same-day ticket by staying in the line, since I was near the front, but a certain ticket beat a probable one, so I booked online for the following day. I read the date three times first.

That ticket got me into the 1.15pm tour on 26 September, and the tour itself was really good.

 

What to Do When the Parliament Tour Is Sold Out

When you load the official Parliament Tour website, the chances are high that every date is going to be showing as sold out. This is not the time to give up or resort to a third party site, although those can be tempting options.

“Sold out” on the booking calendar covers a few different situations, and they need different responses.

Your dates aren’t on the calendar at all. They haven’t been released yet. When I looked on 29 October 2026, the calendar listed tours up to the end of December, so the window was roughly two months. I can’t tell you whether that’s a fixed rule. There’s nothing to do here except come back later.

Your dates are listed but every slot is taken. I nearly gave up at this point, which would have been a mistake. I saw this happen twice. A slot for that same afternoon appeared when I checked from Vienna, which is the one I booked by mistake, and slots for the next day appeared while I was standing in the queue. I don’t know whether that’s returned tickets, extra capacity or something else, because the operator doesn’t say, so all I can tell you is what I saw: check the day before, and check again early on the morning itself. The man ahead of me in the queue did exactly that and went back to his hotel.

The same-day queue. The ticket office in the Visitor Centre sells same-day tickets in limited numbers, and advance tickets aren’t sold there at all. The office opened at 8am when I was there, and if you want a same-day ticket I wouldn’t arrive after 7.30am. That’s based on one morning in late September, so treat it as a guide rather than a rule. Keep refreshing the booking site while you wait. You can pay in cash or by card, in forints.

Resellers. If you only have a day or two in Budapest, or your dates are fixed and you can’t do a 7.30am queue, this is the realistic option, and I’d go straight here rather than gamble on the calendar. Tour companies hold their own allocations and sell them at a premium. GetYourGuide’s Parliament entry ticket with audio guide is the standard 45-minute audioguide tour, and it comes with free cancellation up to 24 hours before, which the official ticket doesn’t.

Viator’s Hungarian Parliament audio guided tour is also the audioguide version, priced in EEA and non-EEA tiers like the official ticket, and all sales are final.

There’s also a public gallery for watching sittings. The Parliament’s visitor pages say it’s open to guests of MPs and, if you’re over 14, by gallery ticket, with enquiries to its Public Relations Department. Those are the days tours get suspended anyway, and it isn’t something to plan a trip around.

 

Budapest Parliament Ticket Prices (2026)

These are the official admission fees from 1 January 2026. The split is by EEA citizenship, which is the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. An EEA residence card also counts. Everyone else, which includes visitors from the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, pays the non-EEA rate.

Ticket	EEA citizens	Non-EEA citizens
Adult	HUF 7,000	HUF 14,000
Student (aged 6 to 24)	HUF 3,500	HUF 7,000
Children under 6	Free	Free
Family ticket, adult (max 2)	HUF 4,900	HUF 11,200
Family ticket, child aged 6 to 14 (max 3)	HUF 2,450	HUF 5,600

Source: the operator’s ticket prices page and the conditions sheet linked from the booking site, read in October 2026.

Online bookings also carry jegymester’s booking fee (they call it an e-fee), which is HUF 399 plus 2.5% of the ticket price. On a HUF 14,000 ticket that’s HUF 749, which is why my receipt said HUF 14,749 and not 14,000. Both times.

You’re asked to show proof of nationality and of any discount at the entrance. I had my passport with me and nobody asked to see it, but I was paying full price. If you’re claiming the EEA rate or a student ticket, have the document to hand.

A family ticket needs at least one child aged 14 or under, with one or two adults. If your child is under 6 (so free), you can’t buy the family ticket online; the operator asks you to email tourist.office@parlament.hu to arrange it.

 

Official Site vs Resellers: Who Sells Parliament Tickets

The Google results for this tour are a muddle of official pages, resellers and sites that look official, so here’s who is who.

jegymester.hu is the official channel. It’s a Hungarian ticketing platform, and the Parliament’s booking page on it is run for the Office of the National Assembly, which is why the contact details on it are the Parliament’s own. Advance tickets for individual visitors are sold here and nowhere else, which the Parliament’s own purchasing tickets page confirms. The site has an English option, and the checkout is a normal card payment.

hungarianparliament.com, which is the top Google result for “budapest parliament tour”, is not the Parliament. It’s run by a private company called Budapest Tickets Ltd. Its own small print says so, and points to parlament.hu as the official site. Its “Official Parliament Tour” tile just sends you to jegymester, and what the site sells itself are packages (a bus tour with a Parliament visit, that sort of thing) under its own terms. I’m not linking to it. If you want the plain tour, go to the source.

GetYourGuide and Viator are resellers. Both products above are the same 45-minute audioguide tour you’d get from the official site. They cost more than the official ticket, and the only real difference in what you get is the cancellation policy: GetYourGuide’s can be cancelled up to 24 hours before for a full refund, Viator’s is final sale like the official ticket. If your plans are loose, that cancellation window on GetYourGuide is a fair reason to pay a bit more.

Resellers also tend to have more availability than the first party site, so they might be your only option.

 

Change and Refund Rules: Check the Date Before You Pay

I learnt these the expensive way, so here they are in one place.

• You can move your booking yourself on the ticket site to any other slot that still has tickets, up to three hours before your tour starts. There’s a booking fee on the change, and jegymester’s customer office told me a ticket can only be changed once.
• If no other slot has tickets, you can’t move it. That’s what happened to me. Based on how often the tours show as sold out, I’d not bank on this option.
• If you cancel, or just don’t turn up, there’s no refund.
• If you’re late, you can be refused entry, with no refund or exchange. The groups don’t wait for individuals.
• If the Parliament cancels your tour, because of a sitting or a state event, you get the admission fee back. This can happen at very short notice, right up to the moment you’d be let in.

The calendar opens on the current day, so if you’re booking in a hurry from another city, as I was, it’s easy to grab today’s slot thinking it’s tomorrow’s.

 

What You See on the Tour

The tour runs on a fixed route and takes about 45 minutes, and that figure includes getting through security at the start. Tours went every 15 minutes while I was there, so of course there are a lot of groups moving through the building at once.

Mine was the audioguide version, which is the standard. You choose your language on the handset after security, and you’re walked round by two members of staff, one at the front and one at the back, who make sure nobody wanders off and remind you where you can and can’t take photos. If you’d rather have a live guide, the official site sells guided tours in Hungarian, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The audioguide adds another twenty languages on top of those, including Korean and Japanese.

The route, in order, is the City Side Staircase, the Grand Stairway, the Dome Hall, the Lounge of the Chamber of Peers, the Chamber of Peers itself, and the Béla Neÿ Hall at the end, which holds a small Parliament Museum exhibition.

The Grand Stairway is the bit everyone photographs, with good reason. The Dome Hall is the bit nobody photographs, because the Holy Crown of Hungary has been kept there since 2000, under guard, and photography is banned throughout the hall to protect it.

The staff were very clear about this. The crown itself is behind glass, with a pair of fairly scary-looking guards beside it, but you get close enough to see all the detail. The Chamber of Peers, the former upper house, is the room you get the longest look at, and it’s beautiful.

The building opened in 1902 and was finished in 1904. It’s 268 metres long, has 691 rooms and stands 96 metres tall, which is a nod to 896, the traditional date of the Magyar conquest. Not that you’ll see most of it. The tour covers a handful of rooms on one route, which is fine, because they’re the right rooms.

Photography is allowed everywhere on the tour except the Dome Hall and the security area. No tripods, obviously, and the groups keep moving, so a fast lens and a high ISO will do more for you than any amount of planning.

 

Is the Budapest Parliament Tour Worth It?

Yes. I’d give it 4 out of 5. The interior is as good as the exterior promises, the staff were good, and 45 minutes is about right for what’s on the route. The missing point is for the price, which is on the high side for a short tour once you’re paying the non-EEA rate plus the fee, and for how hard the tickets are to get. If you can get a slot without too much pain, do it.

 

Seeing the Parliament from Outside and from the River

If you can’t, you lose less than you might think, because the building’s best side is the outside. From the Buda bank at Batthyány tér, directly across the river, you get the full front elevation with the dome in the middle, and it’s free.

From Fisherman’s Bastion, up on Castle Hill, you get it from above, with the river in the frame. Both are on every tourist’s route anyway. Kossuth tér, the square on the city side, gives you the building at close range and the ceremonial flag raising I stumbled into from the ticket queue.

The Visitor Centre also has a free exhibition, One Thousand Years of Hungarian Legislation, which you can walk into without a tour ticket. I popped in while I was there. It was fine, and worth popping in for, since it’s free and right by the ticket office.

The other way to see the building is from the water, at night, when it’s lit up. We did a night cruise with Legenda, booked direct on their site, because our copy of Rick Steves Budapest had a discount coupon in it. We used that book a lot on this trip, for its walking tours and food advice as well as the cruise discount, and it was excellent.

If you don’t have the book, the official Budapest Card gives 25% off Legenda’s cruises, and GetYourGuide sells a night sightseeing cruise with a drink included. The Parliament from the river after dark is the photograph you came to Budapest for, so even if you tour the inside, do this as well.

 

On the Day: Visitor Centre, Security and Arrival

Everything starts at the Visitor Centre, which is underground at the north end of Kossuth tér. Walk along the front of the Parliament with the building on your left and the river beyond it, carry on past the end of the building, and you’ll see a large set of steps leading down. It’s pretty obvious once you’re at that end of the square.

The ticket office is down there, the tours start from there, the free exhibition is there, and so are free toilets, which are good to know about in general as they can be hard to come by.

Visiting hours are 8am to 6pm from April to October and 8am to 4pm from November to March, every day, with the ticket office opening at 8am. Kossuth tér is closed to traffic, so there’s no parking at the building. Come on foot, or by metro to Kossuth Lajos tér on the M2 line, which brings you up right on the square.

For my 1.15pm tour, people started lining up at the Visitor Centre just after one. A member of staff walked the line checking everyone had a ticket, then we went through the ticket check and the security screening. Budget 15 minutes before your slot. The official line is that late arrivals can be refused, and the groups won’t wait for you.

On the ticket itself: the Parliament’s own FAQ says to bring a printed copy, and if you can’t print it, you collect it at the ticket office by giving your name and your booked time. I had the hotel reception print mine. The booking also gave me a Google Wallet pass, which I didn’t risk, because the official rule says paper. Nobody asked me for a passport or ID at the gate, but as I said above, the rule is that you may be asked for proof of nationality or of a discount, so bring it.

Security is airport-style. Large bags and packages aren’t allowed in. The only liquid you can carry is one unbreakable plastic bottle of up to half a litre, holding a colourless soft drink, liquid medicine or baby food, and it comes out of your bag for screening. Anything else goes in the cloakroom. Cameras are fine.

Tours get suspended for sittings of Parliament and for state events, sometimes at very short notice, and in those cases the admission fee is refunded. The notices appear on the jegymester booking page and on the Parliament’s visitor news page, and in late October 2026 the booking page was listing a closure for one afternoon because of a protocol event. Check both pages the day before you go.

 

Budapest Parliament Tour: Frequently Asked Questions

 

Do you need tickets to visit the Budapest Parliament?

Yes. The inside of the building can only be visited on a timed guided tour with a ticket. Advance tickets are sold online at jegymester.hu, and a limited number of same-day tickets are sold at the Visitor Centre ticket office on Kossuth tér from 8am.

The outside, the square and the Visitor Centre’s own exhibition are free, and you don’t need a ticket for any of them.

 

How much is the Budapest Parliament tour?

In 2026 a standard adult ticket is HUF 7,000 for EEA citizens and HUF 14,000 for everyone else, plus a booking fee of HUF 399 and 2.5% on online purchases. Students aged 6 to 24 pay half, children under 6 go free, and there are family tickets.

American, British, Canadian and Australian visitors all pay the non-EEA rate. My ticket came to HUF 14,749.

 

How do I get tickets for the Hungarian Parliament?

Book on jegymester.hu, the official seller, as soon as your dates appear on the calendar. The calendar is only released a couple of months ahead, and popular dates sell out weeks before.

If your date is sold out, check again the day before and early on the morning itself, when slots reappeared for me. Failing that, queue at the Visitor Centre ticket office before it opens at 8am for a same-day ticket, or buy through a reseller such as GetYourGuide at a premium. If you’re only in Budapest for a day or two, a reseller such as GetYourGuide is the quicker route, at a premium.

 

How long is the Budapest Parliament tour?

About 45 minutes, and the operator’s own figure includes the security check at the start. Tours leave every 15 minutes or so, with audioguide tours in 26 languages and live-guided tours in six.

 

Is the Budapest Parliament tour worth it?

Yes, 4 out of 5 from me. The Grand Stairway, the Dome Hall with the Holy Crown and the Chamber of Peers are all on the route, and they’re as good as the outside of the building suggests.

The two things against it are the price for a non-EEA visitor and the difficulty of getting a ticket. If you can’t get one, the exterior from the Buda bank and from Fisherman’s Bastion costs nothing and is the view most people come for.

 

Can you visit the Budapest Parliament without a tour?

Not the inside. The building is a working parliament, and individual visitors only get in on the guided tour.

You can walk all the way round the outside on Kossuth tér, visit the free exhibition in the Visitor Centre, and see the building from the river on a cruise, none of which needs a tour ticket.

 

Is the Parliament included in the Budapest Card?

No. The Parliament tour isn’t on the official Budapest Card partner list for 2026/2027, as free or discounted, so budget for it separately. The card does give 25% off Legenda’s river cruises, which is a pretty cheap way to see the building from the water.

Be aware that there are third-party sites selling a “Budapest Card” that aren’t the official one. The official card is run and sold by BKK, the city’s transport authority.

 

Can you take photos inside the Hungarian Parliament?

Yes, everywhere on the tour except the Dome Hall, where the Holy Crown is kept, and the security screening area. The ban in the Dome Hall is enforced by the staff on the tour.

 

Do I need to print my Parliament ticket?

The Parliament’s official FAQ says yes: entry is with a printed ticket, and if you can’t print it, you collect it at the Visitor Centre ticket office by giving your name and booked time. I printed mine at the hotel. The booking also issued a Google Wallet pass, but I didn’t test whether that would have been accepted.

 

What happens if the Parliament tour is cancelled?

Tours are suspended for parliamentary sittings and state events, sometimes at very short notice. If the Parliament cancels your tour, the admission fee is refunded. If you cancel or don’t turn up, it isn’t.

Closure notices appear on the jegymester booking page and on the Parliament’s visitor news page, so check both the day before.

 

What’s the Budapest Parliament dress code?

There isn’t a formal one, but the conditions of visit ask for respectful dress and behaviour, and the guards can remove anyone who ignores them. Eating, drinking and sitting on the stairs or furniture aren’t allowed on the tour. Normal tourist clothes are fine.

 

Further Reading

Budapest was the last stop on a trip that started in Prague and came through Vienna, and I’ve written up both of those too.

• Our 2 day Vienna itinerary, where I booked the wrong Parliament ticket from
• Our 3 days in Prague itinerary
• Our guide to day trips from Prague
• For the city itself, the Rick Steves Budapest guidebook, which we used for most of our time there

If you’ve tried the same-day queue, or found a trick for the calendar I’ve missed, let me know in the comments below, because I’ll be back in Budapest and I’d rather not pay for this tour three times.