Last verified: September 17, 2026. That evening I clicked through every bookable date on the park’s own ticket shop, read the 2026 tariff page and the visitor regulation, and compared the official price against the main reseller listings. I’ll re-run the availability check and re-read every price and rule in this guide monthly.
Pompeii lets in 20,000 people a day and not one more. So most of us book it the way you’d book a sold-out concert, months out, braced for disappointment.
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On September 17, 2026 I opened the park’s own shop expecting a wall of red dates. There wasn’t one. Not a single sold-out date, for either ticket, anywhere in the calendar. What I found instead was stranger: the calendar only reached 27 days, stopped dead on October 14, and had nothing at all on sale beyond it.
That gap between the reputation and the reality is why Pompeii tickets confuse people. You’ll meet a price of €18, retired in January. A “combined Pompeii and Herculaneum ticket” that has never existed. Six official-looking websites selling the same entry at a markup, only one of which admits it isn’t the park.
This guide covers what each ticket costs now, what the daily cap actually does to your day, how to book on the real site, the name rule and its 48-hour catch, and why there’s no Herculaneum combo. Then the trains, the hours, and the price change landing on January 1. For how Italy’s fixed-date sights are booked across the country, the experiences guide has the full ladder.
Key Takeaways
- Pompeii Express costs €20 and Pompeii Plus €25, with advance sale and commission fees already inside that price (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, 2026).
- The park caps the site at 20,000 entries a day, split into 15,000 before 1pm and only 5,000 after.
- On September 17 no date was sold out, but the shop sold just 27 days ahead and stopped at the season boundary.
- There is no combined Pompeii and Herculaneum ticket. Herculaneum is a separate park at €16 plus a €1.50 fee.
- From January 1, one €25 ticket covers every park site for 30 days.
Table of Contents
How Much Do Pompeii Tickets Cost?
Pompeii Express, the ancient city on its own, costs €20. Pompeii Plus, which adds the Villa of the Mysteries, the Villa of Diomedes and Villa Regina at Boscoreale, costs €25. EU citizens aged 18 to 24 pay €2, and under-18s go free (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Timetables and tickets, 2026).
Those prices took effect on January 12, 2026. The ladder before them ran €11, then €13, then €15 in 2017, €16 in 2022 and €18 in 2023. If a guide quotes you €16 or €18, it’s reading an old tariff.
Here’s the part almost every page gets wrong. When I reached the checkout on the official shop, the ticket page carried a plain notice: prices include advance sale and commission fees, VAT included. So €20 is €20. The €1 and €1.50 online fees you’ll see quoted for Pompeii belong to the park’s previous ticket seller, and they’re gone. Herculaneum, a different park on a different shop, does still charge €1.50.
The third ticket is the one worth knowing about. For €30 you get “Pompeii and other sites”, which is Pompeii Plus plus Oplontis, Villa Arianna, Villa San Marco, the Stabiae archaeological museum and the free shuttle between them, valid three days with one entry per site. Single minor sites cost €8 each. Villa Arianna and Villa San Marco are free, which is a fact off the park’s own tariff page and one I’ve never seen on a competing guide.
| Ticket | Price | Reduced | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pompeii Express | €20 | €2 | The ancient city, suburban villas excluded |
| Pompeii Plus | €25 | €2 | City, Villa of the Mysteries, Villa of Diomedes, Villa Regina |
| Pompeii and other sites, 3 days | €30 | €2 | Plus, Oplontis, both Stabiae villas, Stabiae museum, shuttle |
| Oplontis, Boscoreale or Stabiae museum | €8 | €2 | One site, one entry |
| Villa Arianna, Villa San Marco | Free | Free | Two Stabiae villas, no ticket needed |
| MyPompeii annual card | €45 | €10 under 25 | Every site, 365 days from first use |
| Official guided tour | €8 | Free under 10 | 90 minutes, on top of entry |
| Herculaneum | €16 + €1.50 | €2 | Separate park, separate shop |
Add-ons are modest. The audioguide runs €9 for one unit, and only the park’s own audioguides may be used inside. If you bought Express and change your mind at the Herculaneum Gate, the suburban villas cost €8 more, card payment only. For what a day at the ruins costs all-in, including the train and lunch, our cost guide breaks down a full Campania day.
What Happens to Pompeii Tickets on January 1?
On September 14, 2026 the park published a new tariff system for January 1, 2027: a single ticket covering every site in the park at €25, valid 30 days with one entry per site (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Nuovo sistema tariffario, 2026). The €8 single-site tickets and the €45 MyPompeii card stay as they are, and so do the existing reductions.
So is it better or worse? Read it against the current €30 three-day pass and you’ll see. The same basket of sites gets €5 cheaper and its validity stretches from three days to thirty. For anyone splitting Pompeii and Oplontis across a week in Campania, that’s a genuinely better product.
One honest caveat, because I can’t find the answer and neither can anyone else. The release never mentions Pompeii Express or Pompeii Plus by name. So nobody outside the park can say yet whether the €20 tier survives, or whether €25 simply becomes the only price. I’d plan on the second and be pleased if I’m wrong.
The same release restates two things that are not changing: the 20,000 daily cap, and the requirement that every ticket carries the visitor’s name. Those are the two rules that shape your day, so they’re next.
What Does the 20,000 Daily Cap Do to Your Day?
Pompeii has admitted a maximum of 20,000 visitors a day since November 15, 2024, and from March 16 to October 14 that total splits into no more than 15,000 entries between 09:00 and 13:00, and only 5,000 between 13:00 and 17:30 (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Orari e tariffe, 2026). The cap itself runs year-round. Only the split is seasonal.
Look at what that means and the usual advice inverts. Three-quarters of the day’s capacity sits in the morning band. The scarce thing at Pompeii isn’t the date, it’s the 09:00 slot, and it’s scarce by design rather than by demand.
Does that ceiling ever actually bite? It does, twice on the record. On the first free Sunday of May in 2025, and again on the first free Sunday of May in 2026, Pompeii reached 20,000 before lunch and suspended entries for several hours, letting people in again in the early afternoon (Archaeoreporter, 2025). Both were free days, when nobody books and everyone arrives at once. The park publishes no running tally, so I won’t pretend this is routine. On an ordinary day it isn’t close.
The park’s own month-by-month figures explain why, and they contain a surprise.
May 2024 was Pompeii’s busiest month at 516,923 visitors. August, the month everyone tells you to avoid, came in at 421,255. September and October both beat it too. The shoulder months are the crowded ones, because that’s when the tour buses and the school groups run, and it’s a useful corrective if you’ve been steered toward late spring for the weather. For the months when Italy’s big sights thin out, the timing guide has the national picture.
Do Pompeii Tickets Sell Out? What the Official Shop Showed Me
On September 17, 2026 the park’s own shop at pompeii.vivaticket.it had no sold-out date at all, for either Pompeii Express or Pompeii Plus. It also only sold 27 days ahead, from September 18 to October 14, and nothing beyond that had been loaded. The practical limit on booking Pompeii isn’t demand. It’s how far the calendar reaches.
I want to be precise about what I did, because nobody else publishes this. I opened the official shop, clicked each bookable date, and read the slots the site offered. Every day from September 18 to October 14 came back green. October 4 was greyed out, because the first Sunday is free and free days are not sold online. Past October 14 there was no next-month arrow at all, and October 14 is exactly where the summer season ends.
Two more things fell out of that. September 17 itself, the day I was looking, wasn’t bookable, so there’s no same-day online sale. And there are exactly two bookable slots a day, 09.00 and 13.00. Not 15-minute slots, whatever you’ve read. The slot is the cap band.
Even the scarce band held up. On Sunday September 20, three days out, the 13:00 slot with its 5,000 places was still selling.
So where does “book Pompeii 45 days ahead” come from? Not from the park, which publishes no booking horizon at all. It appears on a handful of low-authority pages that all trace back to one unsourced claim, and I’m afraid we repeated it too, on this site, until this check. Consider it corrected.
The trend under the cap is worth a look. Pompeii set its record in 2024 with 4,177,753 visitors across the park, then came in at 4,118,926 in 2025, down 1.41 percent (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Visitor data, 2025). That’s the first full year under the cap, and it did what it was meant to do. For context on where Pompeii sits nationally, the Ministry of Culture ranked it third among Italy’s state sites in 2024, at 4,267,233 visitors and €55.3 million in receipts, behind the Colosseum park and the Uffizi (Ministero della Cultura, 2025).
Every other big Italian ticket works differently, which is why the sequencing trips people up. The Colosseum releases on a 30-day clock and goes in minutes. The Vatican’s calendar runs about four weeks out in season. Florence sells out by slot rather than by date. Pompeii is the odd one: the date is easy, the calendar is short.
How Do You Book Pompeii Tickets on the Official Site?
Buy at pompeii.vivaticket.it, the shop linked from pompeiisites.org, which took over as the park’s seller in March 2026. The park’s only other legitimate counters are inside the archaeological area, at Porta Marina, Piazza Esedra and Piazza Anfiteatro (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Buy tickets, 2026).
- Open the shop and choose Pompeii Express or Pompeii Plus. The three-day pass sits under “Pompei and other sites”.
- Pick your date on the calendar. Green means available, grey means not on sale.
- Pick 09.00 or 13.00. Those are the only two slots.
- Choose your ticket types. Free under-18 tickets can’t be bought on their own, and you can add a maximum of four per paid ticket.
- Enter each visitor’s name exactly as it appears on the ID they’ll travel with.
- Register or sign in. The checkout won’t let you pay without an account.
- Pay. The ticket arrives as a PDF, on your phone or printed, and goes straight to the turnstile.
One entry only. You can’t leave and come back on the same ticket, which matters more than it sounds when the site is 44 hectares and the good lunch is outside the gate.
So which site is the real one? Search for Pompeii tickets and you’ll get one official result and a row of official-sounding ones: pompeionline.net, pompeitickets.com, visitpompeiivesuvius.com, pompeii-tickets.com, italy-tourist-information.com, thepompeii.com, ticketory.com. Some are honest about what they are. The Headout-operated one states plainly on the page that it isn’t the venue’s website. Others say nothing at all, and one of them charges €8 for under-18s who walk in free.
Ticketory deserves its own warning. What it sells is a voucher you exchange for the real ticket at a separate office before you enter, which is a detour nobody needs at 9am. And there’s one more trap that isn’t a reseller’s fault at all: the Ministry of Culture’s own page for Pompeii, updated in August 2026, still tells you to buy from TicketOne, the seller replaced in March. Trust the park’s site, not the ministry’s. Our guide to the lookalike sites and ticket touts covers the pattern across Italy.
Are Pompeii Tickets Named, and Can You Change the Name?
Pompeii tickets have been nominative since November 15, 2024. The ticket shows the holder’s name plus the day and time band, staff may ask for ID, and a mismatch means refused entry with no refund (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Regulations for visitors, Decreto 446 del 23/12/2025).
The regulation is blunt about what you can’t do. Tickets are personal and non-transferable. No changes to the name. No changes to the date. No refunds, except if the park is forced to close.
Except the shop says something else. At checkout, Vivaticket advertises a user-change service, and on all three dates I sampled it closed at exactly 48 hours before the slot. For a 09:00 entry on October 7, changes ran until 09:00 on October 5. Both of those are official sources, and they contradict each other.
Here’s how I’d treat it. Book under the right names and plan as though the regulation means what it says. If you then need to swap a name, try the change service, well outside that 48-hour line. It’s a long shot with a real chance, not a policy you can rely on.
The name rule has a cost at the gate that nobody mentions when they praise it. Tour guides reported manual name checks running four to five minutes per visitor, and queues of up to 45 minutes in direct sun, with only three entrances to spread the load (The Art Newspaper, 2025). Arrive at the start of your band, not in the middle of it. Bring the actual passport you booked with. The Colosseum, the Vatican and both big Florence museums now print your name too, so pack it once and stop worrying.
There Is No Pompeii and Herculaneum Ticket. Here’s What to Buy Instead
No combined Pompeii and Herculaneum ticket exists. They’re two separate state parks with two separate sellers, Vivaticket for Pompeii and CoopCulture for Herculaneum, and neither park’s ticket list contains a product for the other. Herculaneum costs €16 plus a €1.50 booking fee (Parco Archeologico di Ercolano, Tickets, 2026).
That myth has a specific origin, so it’s worth naming. Resellers still advertise a “cumulative” Pompeii and Herculaneum ticket at about €22, and that was a real product: the five-site archaeological circuit retired before 2024. What replaced it is the park’s own €30 three-day pass, and it reaches Oplontis, Stabiae and Boscoreale but never Herculaneum, which left the Pompeii park’s administration years ago.
Should you go to both? Do them on separate mornings, and do Herculaneum first if you only have one. It’s smaller, it’s six minutes’ walk from Ercolano Scavi station, and it kept its upper floors, its wooden doors and its ceilings, which Pompeii mostly didn’t.
The numbers make the case better than I can. Herculaneum took 553,611 visitors in 2025 against 521,426 in 2024, up 6.2 percent (Parco Archeologico di Ercolano, 2026). Pompeii took 4,118,926 and fell. That’s roughly seven people at Pompeii for every one at Herculaneum, by my arithmetic on the two parks’ own figures, and you feel every bit of it on the ground.
And if you want the quiet version of the whole thing, the €30 pass buys you Oplontis on a weekday morning with almost nobody in it. Villa Arianna and Villa San Marco cost nothing at all. Our Naples guide covers Pompeii or Herculaneum and whether to do both as part of a three-night plan.
Getting There, and the Train Change You Need to Know About
Start with the bad news, because it’s about to strand people. The Campania Express is suspended from October 1, 2026, with no end date announced, and EAV is refunding tickets already bought for travel after September 30 (EAV, 2026). Every guide recommending the fast tourist train, including ours until today, is about to be wrong.
That leaves the ordinary Circumvesuviana, and the station name is the thing that costs people their morning. Pompei Villa dei Misteri, on the Naples to Sorrento line, is the stop for the Porta Marina and Piazza Esedra gates. Pompei Santuario, on the Naples to Poggiomarino line, serves Piazza Anfiteatro. The Trenitalia station called simply Pompei, on the Naples to Salerno line, sits in the modern town and connects to the park in about 15 minutes on a combined Pompei Link ticket (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, How to get there, 2026).
A single from Naples costs €4.10 under the UnicoCampania fare band in force since July 14, 2026. The €3.30 still printed on plenty of pages is a retired fare. Journey time runs around 35 minutes, though no official source publishes it, so treat that as approximate. Our guide to regional trains and the Circumvesuviana has the wider network.
Two things ride free that people pay for anyway. The park’s Artebus shuttle connects Pompeii to the outer sites at no cost for ticket holders, subject to space, though routes 2 and 3 don’t run on Tuesdays. And the Campania Artecard at €41 for three days covers Pompeii, Herculaneum and the regional transport between them. It does not cover the Vesuvius crater, which is a separate national park at a €10 rate that reaches €11.68 once the compulsory online booking lands, sold only at vesuviopark.vivaticket.it.
What Are Pompeii’s Opening Hours and Free Days?
Pompeii opens at 09:00 every day except December 25 and January 1. From March 16 to October 14 the last admission is 17:30 and the site closes at 19:00. From October 15 to March 15 the last admission is 15:30 and it closes at 17:00 (Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Timetables and tickets, 2026).
| Summer, Mar 16 to Oct 14 | Winter, Oct 15 to Mar 15 | |
|---|---|---|
| Opens | 09:00 | 09:00 |
| Last admission | 17:30 | 15:30 |
| Closes | 19:00 | 17:00 |
| Time bands | 09:00 to 13:00 (15,000), 13:00 to 17:30 (5,000) | No split published |
| Closed | Dec 25 and Jan 1 | Dec 25 and Jan 1 |
| Minor sites | Oplontis, Stabiae and the Stabiae museum close Tuesdays | Same |
Entry is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month. Three rules come with it: nothing can be booked online, tickets aren’t named that day, and you walk straight through the turnstiles. The 20,000 cap still applies, which is exactly why both recorded cap hits were free Sundays. The remaining free Sundays in 2026 fall on October 4, November 1 and December 6, though I’d confirm each about a week ahead rather than trust my arithmetic.
Then the rules that get people turned away. Bags are capped at 30 by 30 by 15 centimetres, which is smaller than a daypack, and anything bigger goes to left luggage at Porta Marina or Piazza Anfiteatro. Organised groups run from 5 to 35 people, with headsets compulsory above 15. No tripods, no flash, no drones without authorisation, no bare chests. Dogs only under 10 kilos and 40 centimetres. Our packing guide covers the bag that gets through Italian security without a cloakroom detour.
One last practical note, and it’s the park’s own. Pompeii publishes hot-weather guidance that names where the shade actually is: the Triangular Forum, the Necropolis of Porta Stabia, the amphitheatre ambulatories and the Garden of the Great Palaestra. There are drinking fountains too, with a map at the entrances. In July that list is worth more than any ticket tier.
The Bottom Line: Book the Band, Not Just the Day
The date almost never sells out. The 09:00 band is the scarce thing, because three-quarters of the day’s capacity sits inside it, so that’s what you book the moment your dates are fixed.
Buy on pompeii.vivaticket.it and nowhere else. Put the names on it that match the passports you’re travelling with. If your dates sit past where the calendar reaches, wait and check again rather than buying from a site that merely looks official. Pay the extra €5 for Plus if the Villa of the Mysteries matters to you, or €30 if you’ve got three days and want Oplontis with nobody in it. Then give Herculaneum a second morning.
For the network’s booking order, corrected by this check: the Accademia and the Uffizi’s early slots about five weeks out, Pompeii as soon as its calendar reaches your date, the Vatican as soon as your dates are set, then the Colosseum at 30 days on the dot. Our sequencing rule for Italy’s fixed-date sights puts all four in one place, and a dedicated guide to Rome’s ancient sites, Ostia Antica included, follows later in the year.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much are Pompeii tickets?
Pompeii Express, the ancient city alone, costs €20, and Pompeii Plus, which adds the Villa of the Mysteries and Villa Regina, costs €25. EU citizens aged 18 to 24 pay €2 and under-18s are free. The checkout states that advance sale and commission fees are already included, so there’s nothing added at the end.
Do Pompeii tickets sell out?
Rarely by date. When I checked the official shop on September 17, 2026, not one date was sold out, but the calendar only sold 27 days ahead and nothing past October 14 was loaded. The real constraint is the morning band: 15,000 entries between 09:00 and 13:00, and only 5,000 after.
Is there a combined Pompeii and Herculaneum ticket?
No. They’re separate parks with separate sellers, and neither sells a ticket covering the other. The €22 combined ticket still advertised by resellers is a retired circuit price. Herculaneum costs €16 plus a €1.50 fee on its own shop. The park’s multi-site ticket is the €30 three-day pass, covering Oplontis, Stabiae and Boscoreale.
What is the official Pompeii ticket website?
The park sells through pompeii.vivaticket.it, linked from pompeiisites.org, and the seller changed in March 2026. The Ministry of Culture’s own page still names the previous seller, so go through the park’s site. Physical ticket offices sit inside the site at Porta Marina, Piazza Esedra and Piazza Anfiteatro.
Are Pompeii tickets named, and can I change the name?
Yes, every ticket has carried the visitor’s name since November 15, 2024, and staff can ask for ID. A mismatch means no entry and no refund. The park’s regulation says the name and date can’t be changed, while the shop’s checkout offers a change service closing 48 hours before your slot. Book under the right name.
