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The Met's collection contains more than 1.5 million objects, spanning over 5,000 years of global history, which means the honest first question is not what to see but what to skip. A focused half-day beats an exhausted full one, so this guide is about planning the visit: how admission works, when to go, and which galleries actually reward the walk.
We at Travelmyth, the hotel search engine that ranks stays by your interests and needs across 60 stay categories, put this guide together for the first-time visitor staring at the floor plan. The Met is an encyclopedic museum and one of the world’s largest art museums, so we have laid out the practical parts, from tickets and hours to a highlights route, as a companion to our wider guide to things to do in New York City.
The Met's headline ticket detail is the one people get wrong. General admission is $30 for adults, $22 for seniors 65 and over, and $17 for students; visitors with a disability pay $22. The pay-what-you-wish rule is narrower than the internet suggests: it applies to New York State residents and to students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, who set their own price down to a one-cent minimum. Everyone else pays the posted fare.
One thing that is genuinely generous: a ticket includes same-day entry to both Met locations, the main building on Fifth Avenue and the Met Cloisters uptown, for the date printed on it.
The Met Fifth Avenue is open Sunday through Tuesday and Thursday from 10 am to 5 pm, and Friday and Saturday from 10 am to 9 pm; it is closed on Wednesdays, and also on Thanksgiving, December 25, January 1 and the first Monday in May. Hours can change, so confirm before you go. For the quietest galleries, arrive at opening or use the later Friday and Saturday hours; midday on weekends tends to be the busiest time.
Trying to see everything is how the Met defeats you. Pick a few areas and walk them properly. Start with the Egyptian galleries, drawn from a collection of approximately 30,000 objects, which lead to the Temple of Dendur, an Egyptian temple set in a light-filled room with a reflecting pool and a glass wall onto Central Park, and one of the museum’s most enduring sights.
From there, the European Paintings galleries, with more than 2,500 works spanning the thirteenth to the early twentieth century, hold the names most people come for. If your tastes run elsewhere, the Arms and Armor court is worth a detour; the department’s collection numbers about 14,000 objects. Three areas at a considered pace make for a good, honest visit.
Give the Met a focused half-day, about three hours, if you follow a route and resist the urge to see it all; a full day is only worth it if you genuinely love museums and pace yourself with a long lunch break. Whatever you plan, the collection will outlast your stamina, so choose depth over breadth and leave the rest for next time.
Your ticket also covers a second, very different museum the same day. The Met Cloisters, up in Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, is the Met's medieval branch, specializing in European art and architecture from the Romanesque and Gothic periods; much of the building incorporates architectural elements from several medieval French cloisters and other European sites. It is a long subway ride from Museum Mile and works best as its own half-day rather than a same-afternoon add-on, but for medieval art and quiet gardens it is worth the trip.
If you only have time for one museum, match it to the kind of visit you want. The Met is the encyclopedic one, spanning thousands of years of art from around the world. The Museum of Modern Art, on 53rd Street in Midtown, runs from the late nineteenth century to the present and is the more digestible half-day for modern and contemporary art. The American Museum of Natural History, across from Central Park on the Upper West Side, is the one for families, with more than 40 permanent halls and a planetarium. Our guide to things to do in New York sets all three side by side.
Basing yourself on the Upper East Side puts the Met and the rest of Museum Mile within walking distance, with Central Park at the door. On Travelmyth you can filter New York stays by the features that matter to you, such as a boutique-style property, family-friendly facilities, accessibility or a stay taking steps toward sustainability, and combine two of those filters at once to narrow the long list to the handful that fit how you travel.