How to get tickets to Auschwitz-Birkenau

The short answer

Entry without a guide is free. The entry pass is not optional: it is personalised, carries a time, and has to be reserved in advance on the Museum’s own site. Free is not the same as available.

The free pass has to be claimed at least seven days ahead, and that is a deadline rather than a release date: a pass for the tenth can be claimed up to and including the third, and from the fourth onwards there is no free way into that day at all. The day can also fill long before that deadline, because the pool only ever shrinks. Either way, a date showing nothing in the system has nothing left on it.

Two different things are being booked here and they run out separately. A free pass carries no language, because nobody is talking. A guided ticket is issued for one language at a time, and every allocation is the same size whatever the language: thirty places. So the figures below are not what the Museum provides for each language. They are what nobody has taken yet.

Checked on 2 October 2026. Free unguided passes: nothing before 19 October — every date from 9 to 18 October had already gone. Guided tickets: nothing in any language but Polish before a single German place on 18 October, then nine Ukrainian on 24 October, one German on 25 and on 26 October, and two Italian on 27 October at different hours.

Nothing is sold at the gate

Since 1 March 2026 all entry cards are issued online only. Arriving at Auschwitz I without a reservation and hoping to buy at the desk no longer works, at any time of year.

There is one official source, and it is visit.auschwitz.org. The Museum states plainly that it does not cooperate with outside companies on entry cards. Anyone implying that their site is the Museum’s, or that they have a private channel into it, is telling you something untrue.

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The three ways in

• Free, without a guide A personalised pass from visit.auschwitz.org. No cost, no guide, no transport, and you cross between the two sites yourself. It is issued only for the last hour in which the Museum admits visitors, which moves with the season — a morning is not on offer at any price. And it has to be claimed at least seven days before the visit, if the day has not filled first.
• Paid, with a Museum guide Booked on the same official site, for individuals or as a private group, and issued for one guiding language. Current prices are on the Museum’s page — we do not reprint them here, because they change and a stale figure would be worse than none.
• Through an operator A company that has already reserved group places and sells them on with transport, a guide and support on the day. More expensive than going alone. Worth it or not depending on what you want from the day.

What the official route does not give you

The Museum is explicit that entry cards for individual visitors are non-changeable and non-refundable. Book the wrong date, or have your plans change, and the pass is simply spent.

The free pass also covers entry only. There is no guide, no transport from Krakow, and nobody to help if the shuttle between Auschwitz I and Birkenau is full when you need it. For many visitors that is entirely fine. It is worth knowing in advance rather than at the gate.

And it falls at the end of the day by definition. Seeing both parts of the Memorial takes about four hours, and a pass for the final admission hour does not leave that much daylight. In practice most people who come this way see Auschwitz I and never reach Birkenau at all; in winter that is close to certain. If you want the morning, or the whole site at an unhurried pace, the free route cannot give you either.

Why bookings through third parties get cancelled

You will read that operators cancel a large share of their tours. The reason is not the one those pages give, and it is worth understanding before you judge any of us by it.

Every operator sells places before the Museum has confirmed them, because the system requires it. Once a reservation is granted there are 24 hours to complete it with the full name of every participant. The sale comes first and the names follow. That is not carelessness on anyone’s part; it is the shape of the system every one of us works inside.

So the difference between operators is not paperwork. It is judgement — how much to sell against capacity not yet secured, when to stop selling a date, and how much already-secured capacity to hold behind the bookings you have taken. That comes from years of watching how the releases behave, and it is the only thing a cancellation rate really measures.

What we do about it is unglamorous: we sell a date in tranches and close it rather than selling through it. A new tranche opens only once the one before it is secured, so exposure never accumulates — at any point, on any date, the number of people genuinely at risk is a handful, however many we are carrying that day. And that exposure sits at the beginning, weeks out, where there is time to resolve it, rather than hours.

Ours is one cancellation in every four hundred — measured on our largest booking channel, across more than four thousand bookings in the last twelve months — and never on the day of the visit.

Where we fit, and when we do not

If you can get a free pass for the date you want, and you are content to travel to Oświęcim and walk the site on your own, take it. That is the cheapest and perfectly good way to visit, and we would rather tell you so than sell you something you did not need.

We are worth the money when the dates you want show nothing, when you want a licensed guide in English, German or French, when you would rather not work out the bus, or when you need the booking to be cancellable. Ours can be cancelled free up to 48 hours before, which the Museum’s own card cannot.

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