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How Admission Works

General admission vs special exhibitions, timed tickets, e-tickets at the door. Neutral — no prices, no selling.

A quiet museum gallery with paintings — **A gallery on a normal weekday morning.** On a Saturday this same space has four hundred strollers in it.

Two different things

People mix these up constantly, so let me separate them:

General admission — the permanent galleries. Dinosaurs, gem vault, mammal halls, the Crystal, the First Peoples gallery. One ticket, all day, come and go as you like (there's a re-entry stamp at the desk).
Special exhibitions — the big touring shows in the dedicated hall. These are priced on top of general admission. A general ticket does not get you into a special show, and a special show ticket does not get you into the permanent galleries. You usually need both.

This catches people at the door every weekend. A family buys the special exhibition ticket online, arrives, and discovers the dinosaurs cost extra. Read the ticket description carefully before you pay — the museum does state it, but in small print under the price.

Timed tickets

Since 2021 the museum runs timed entry for general admission. You pick a date and a half-hour arrival window. Once you're inside you can stay as long as you want — nobody sweeps you out at the end of your slot. The timed ticket only controls when you walk through the door.

In practice: weekday slots are almost always available same-day. Saturday and Sunday slots for the 10 am to noon window sell out several days ahead, especially in March Break and December. If you want a weekend morning, book a week out.

E-tickets at the door

You get a QR code by email or in the museum's app. There's a scanner at the Bloor Street entrance and another at the Queen's Park entrance. Paper printouts work too. What does not work is a screenshot of a screenshot with half the code cut off, which happens about fifty times a day. I used to watch the queue from the loading dock on my smoke break.

Do not buy from a reseller. The museum does not use third-party ticket resellers. If a site other than the museum's own is selling "skip-the-line museum tickets", it's either a guided tour add-on (a different product) or it's a scam. Admission is sold by the museum — their site is here.

Membership

A membership pays for itself in about three visits for one adult, or two for a family. It also gets you into the members' queue, which on a Saturday morning is the difference between eight minutes and forty. If you live in Toronto and have kids, it's the obvious move. If you're visiting from out of town for one day, it isn't.

Accessibility and discounts

There's a discounted rate for students and seniors, and free admission on certain evenings for Ontario residents — the schedule changes, so check the museum's own site rather than trusting a blog post from 2019. The building is fully accessible from the Bloor entrance; the Queen's Park doors have a step.