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Interior in the main hall of the National Museum of the American Indian
Photograph: By agsaz / Shutterstock | Interior in the main hall of the National Museum of the American Indian

All the free museums days in NYC you should know about

From uptown to downtown and Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens, we’ve got all the free museum days and cheap admission in New York City

Written by
Rossilynne Skena Culgan
Contributors
Howard Halle
&
Shaye Weaver
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Free and cheap tickets to NYC's best museums? It's possible! One of the benefits of living in or visiting New York City is all the incredible cultural institutions and museums are at your beck-and-call like The Metropolitan Museum Of ArtMoMA or the Guggenheim. They are among the finest in the world—there’s just one hitch: They’re often pricey to get into.

Unlike cities such as London or Washington, D.C., New York isn’t big on publicly funded museums, which is too bad, especially if you actually live here and have to pay most of your wages on food and rent. Granted, there are senior and student discounts, and memberships that let you get in gratis if you’re willing to pay for the annual fee.

There is one alternative, however: most museums offer free hours or days and pay-what-you-wish admission. You just have to know where and when they are. We’ve got the info you need in our guide to all the free museum days and cheap admission in NYC you should know about, whether you live here or are planning a visit.

RECOMMENDED: Full guide to the best museums in NYC

Free museum days and pay-what-you-wish options

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The Jewish Museum
  • Museums
  • History
  • Central Park

The Jewish Museum is free on Shabbat during regular hours! Go see its exhibits of contemporary and modern art and substantial collection of Judaica. 

Free on Saturdays and select Jewish holidays

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  • Museums
  • Science and technology
  • Upper West Side
  • price 2 of 4

Beyond the iconic, show-stopping displays—the grizzly bear in the Hall of North American Mammals, the 94-feet long blue whale, the prehistoric Barosaurus skeleton rearing up as if to scare the adjacent Allosaurus skeleton—is an expertly curated, 150-year-old museum that fills visitors of all ages with a curiosity about the universe.

Whether you’re interested in the world below our feet, or the cultures of faraway lands or the stars light-years beyond our reach, your visit to AMNH is bound to teach you a few things you never knew.

Admission to the museum is a suggested donation for residents of New York, New Jersey or Connecticut. However, for access to the amazing special exhibits or the mesmerizing Space Show in the Hayden Planetarium, you’ll have to shell out more.

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  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Central Park

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s pay-what-you-wish policy applies to residents of New York State residents only. But hey, it's the greatest museum in the world, right? Remember, even if if you live in New York State, you’ll need one of the following as proof:

-New York State driver’s license
-New York State identification card
-IDNYC
-Current bill or statement with a New York State address
-Student ID
-New York library card

Pay what you wish at the ticket counter for New York State residents

The Morgan Library & Museum
  • Museums
  • History
  • Murray Hill

This Madison Avenue institution began as the private library of financier J. Pierpont Morgan and is his artistic gift to the city.

Building on the collection Morgan amassed in his lifetime, the Morgan Library & Museum houses first-rate works on paper, including drawings by Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso; three Gutenberg Bibles; a copy of Frankenstein annotated by Mary Shelley; manuscripts by Dickens, Poe, Twain, Steinbeck and Wilde; sheet music handwritten by Beethoven and Mozart; and an original edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that’s displayed every yuletide.

Free admission on Fridays, 5-7pm. Reservations are required available one week in advance.

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  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Midtown West

The iconic MoMA houses a collection of 200,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, media and performance art works, architectural models and drawings, design objects and films—adding up to a comprehensive and expansive view of modern art. 

You'll see the classics from Picasso, Matisse and Pollock, plus works from women and artists of color. MoMA offers not only the greatest collection of modern and contemporary art on the globe but also a very narrow window to get in for free. 

The first Friday of every month from 4 to 8pm (reserve online in advance) for NYC residents. Free admission is also offered to staff and students of various universities as well as certain government employees. You can see if you qualify here.

  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Meatpacking District
  • price 2 of 4

Planted at the foot of the Highline along Ganesvoort Street, the new Whitney building boasts some 63,000 square feet of both indoor and outdoor exhibition space. Founded in 1931 by sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt, the Whitney is dedicated to presenting the work of American artists. Its collection holds about 15,000 pieces by nearly 2,000 artists, including Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper (the museum holds his entire estate), Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keeffe and Claes Oldenburg.

Free for visitors every Friday evening from 5–10pm and on the second Sunday of every month beginning on January 12, 2024. Be sure to reserve in advance.

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  • Museums
  • History
  • Upper West Side
  • price 2 of 4

The New-York Historical Society features more than 1.6 million works that explore the history of the city and the country, including exhibits, art and historical artifacts. The Patricia D. Klingenstein Library has more than three million books, newspapers, maps, photographs and more from our nation’s founding through slavery and Reconstruction and beyond.

 Pay what you wish on Fridays from 6-8pm.

  • Museums
  • Special interest
  • Queens

This Queens County treasure is well worth the bus trek or car ride. As the city’s longest continually farmed site in the city (it’s been in operation since 1697), the 47 acres feels like an entirely different world compared to Manhattan.

Feed and pet the barnyard animals, including sheep, ponies and goats, hop aboard a hayride and come back during the fall harvest season when you can go pumpkin picking and attempt to find your way through the Amazing Maize Maze (yes, that’s a corn maze).

Don’t forget to stop by the store on your way out for fresh fruits and veggies grown on the premises!

Admission is free except on special ticketed event days.

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  • Art

Klimt’s dazzling gold-flecked 1907 portrait is known as the “Viennese Mona Lisa” and is reason enough to visit the Neue Galerie, especially for free. It’s also worth the wait on line, which, unfortunately, is unavoidable.

On the First Friday of every month, the museum is open late and offers free admission from 5 to 8pm. Admission will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis. Children under 12 are not admitted during First Fridays.

Museum of Arts & Design
  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Hell's Kitchen

Founded in 1956 as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, the Museum of Arts & Design brings together contemporary objects created in a wide range of media—including clay, glass, wood, metal and cloth—with a strong focus on materials and process.

Visitors can now watch as resident artists create works in studios on the sixth floor, and curators are able to display more of the 2,000-piece permanent collection in the larger space, including porcelain ware by Cindy Sherman, stained glass by Judith Schaechter, black-basalt ceramics by James Turrell, and Robert Arneson’s mural Alice House Wall, on view for the first time in two decades.

Tickets are half-price on Thursdays (special exhibits cost extra).

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The Rubin Museum of Art
  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Chelsea
  • price 1 of 4

This six-story museum (once home to Barneys New York) houses Donald and Shelley Rubin’s impressive collection of Himalayan art and artifacts, as well as large-scale temporary exhibitions.

Tickets are free on Fridays 6–10pm if you reserve in advance. 

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  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Washington Heights

With 750,000 objects, The Hispanic Society Museum & Library boasts the largest assemblage of Spanish art and manuscripts outside Spain. The collection includes many religious artifacts, including 16th-century tombs from the monastery of San Francisco in Cuéllar, Spain.

After a six-year, $10-million renovation, the museum's main building reopened in May 2023. Additional renovation work is planned for the museum's East Building.

Always free.

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  • Museums
  • Special interest
  • East Harlem

From pre-Colombian artifacts to contemporary installations, El Museo covers the waterfront on Latino and Hispanic art. Taking advantage of its generous admission policy makes a visit that much better.

El Museo del Barrio, located in the city's East Harlem neighborhood known as "El Barrio," is the nation's leading Latinx and Latin American cultural institution. 

Pay what you wish daily (suggested admission fee of $9). 

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Queens Museum
  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Queens

Located on the grounds of two World’s Fairs, the QM holds one of Gotham’s most amazing sights: The Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335-square-foot scale model of the five boroughs, created for the 1964 exposition and featuring Lilliputian models of landmarks.

Every day is pay-what-you-wish admission.

Looking for more museums in NYC?

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