St Peter's Basilica

St Peter’s Basilica tickets: what’s free and what you pay for

Entry to St Peter’s Basilica is free for everyone, and you don’t need to book: you join the security queue in the square and walk in. The Vatican Grottoes, where popes are buried beneath the basilica, are free too, and you go down to them from inside. The Treasury museum, though, is closed for works, with no date yet for reopening.

So the tickets you see on sale are for things on top of that free visit: the climb up the dome, an escorted entry with an audio guide, or a guided tour. Each comes with a set time and a way into the basilica, but none of them gets you past the security check.

The dome ticket already includes the basilica, with reserved access. Dome access starts at €33 for the stairs, and the option with the lift costs more. Both come with an audio guide app and help at the meeting point, and the ticket can’t be refunded or moved to another day.

If the basilica is all you’re after, an escorted entry with an audio guide starts at €19. What you pay for in a free church is the way in: you’re met at the meeting point and taken to a separate entry point instead of the main queue, where the security check is the same metal detector, and then the audio guide app shows you round at your own pace. It leaves out the dome, and you can cancel up to 48 hours before.

For someone to explain what you’re looking at, the guided tour of the basilica starts at €17. You meet the guide in St Peter’s Square and listen through a headset, in a group of 25 at most, for an hour and a half to just over two hours. That price is for the basilica alone, and the options that add the Grottoes or the dome cost more. If you’re seeing the Vatican Museums the same day, there’s also a guided tour of the Museums, the Sistine Chapel and the basilica.

What each Rome pass gives you at St Peter’s Basilica

Since nobody pays to get into St Peter’s, no pass saves you an entry fee here; where they do save is on Rome’s paid sights, and our comparison of the Rome passes shows which. At St Peter’s a pass gives you something on top of the free visit: an audio guide, an escorted way in, a guided visit or the dome, depending on the pass and the option you pick.

The Omnia Smart also has the basilica’s audio guide app. The Roma Pass and the 24-hour Omnia give you nothing at St Peter’s.

The dome comes with just two of them, both bundles of timed tickets. The Vatican City Pass has three St Peter’s options, among them the dome and an escorted entry that’s wheelchair accessible. In the Rome Tourist Card, St Peter’s is the alternative to the Pantheon, so taking the dome means leaving the Pantheon out. In both, each ticket has its own time slot, subject to availability, and neither pass can be refunded.

On the Omnia Card and Turbopass Rome, what you get is an audio guide: on the Omnia with the 72-hour card and the Omnia Smart, but not the 24-hour one, and on the Turbopass with every version but the Essentials. On the Go City pass the visit takes up one of your choices, for a host and an audio guide in a church you could walk into for free, so weigh it against the paid sights on your list. No pass covers the two visits you book separately with the basilica, the necropolis under the nave and the Pétros ení multimedia exhibition, and none says it gets you past security.

St Peter’s Basilica hours this winter, and what to wear

Pass or no pass, check the hours before you go. St Peter’s moved to its winter hours on 26 October 2026, closing at 19:00 instead of 20:00, and some guides and ticket sites still show older times. No last entry has been published for the winter, so don’t leave your visit to the final hour.

We’d go first thing. The basilica opens at 7:00, an hour before the Vatican Museums, so you can see it before your museum slot, and Wednesday and Sunday are its busiest days, by its own account. On Sunday the Angelus prayer is at noon in the square. On Wednesday the Pope holds his general audience, in the square or in the Paul VI Hall, and some travel guides say the basilica can’t be visited on a Wednesday morning while the audience is in the square. The basilica’s site doesn’t say so and lists it as open every day, so on a Wednesday we’d go in the afternoon, or check its site that morning.

Ceremonies can change the hours at short notice too. On two days in June 2026 the basilica opened at 9:00 instead of 7:00, and changes like that are only posted on its website.

The Pietà, the Baldachin and the popes’ tombs inside St Peter’s

Once you’re through the doors, look for Michelangelo’s Pietà and the bronze statue of St Peter. Over the high altar stands Bernini’s Baldachin, a canopy by the same artist who designed the colonnade around the square, and St Peter is believed to be buried beneath that altar.

About 91 popes are buried here, in the basilica and in the Vatican Grottoes beneath it, John Paul II and Pius XII among them. You go down to the Grottoes from inside the basilica. Don’t leave them too late: their hours aren’t published, and by 18:00 they’re closed.

Two more visits are booked separately with the basilica. Pétros ení is a 30-minute multimedia exhibition in the Octagonal Rooms, inside one of the dome’s piers, which had never been open to the public before. It shows a digital twin of the basilica made from more than 400,000 photographs, and costs €22 with a visit to the basilica afterwards, or €37 with the dome by lift as well. The necropolis, the excavations under the nave, is shown only on one-hour guided visits for about 12 people aged 10 or over, by request, at €20.

Climbing St Peter’s dome by the stairs or the lift

Above it all is the dome Michelangelo designed, and climbing it takes the visit from one or two hours to about two and a half. By the stairs it’s 551 steps to the top. The lift only saves you the first stretch, the 231 steps up to the terrace, so everyone climbs the last 320 on foot.

From the top you see St Peter’s Square and Bernini’s colonnade below. During special celebrations part of the route, the dome’s inner ring, can close, and on the way down there’s a café and a shop. The climb isn’t suitable for wheelchairs, and the basilica advises against it for anyone with heart or breathing problems, claustrophobia, vertigo or reduced mobility, and during pregnancy, though the basilica itself has ramps and lifts.

St Peter’s Basilica, from Constantine to its 400th anniversary

The church you walk into is the second St Peter’s on this spot. The first was a basilica built by the emperor Constantine in the 4th century, and its replacement took from 1506 to 1626 to build, long enough for Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo and Bernini all to have a hand in it. Pope Urban VIII dedicated it on 18 November 1626, so it turns 400 on 18 November 2026. Expect ceremonies around that date, and check the basilica’s own site before you go that day.

Getting to St Peter’s Basilica, and over from the Vatican Museums

The easy way in is the metro: line A to Ottaviano–San Pietro, then on foot to the square. On the way, walk past anyone who tells you the basilica is closed: it’s a scam.

Coming from the Vatican Museums, count on walking round to the square and joining the security queue. The Museums’ only official word on a way through from the Sistine Chapel, from December 2021, says the exit will stay closed until further notice, and the reports of a passage are about guided groups, not visitors on a standard ticket.