Holyrood Palace: it is closed two days a week and nobody tells you

The Palace of Holyroodhouse sits at the foot of the Royal Mile, exactly one mile downhill from Edinburgh Castle, and it is the single easiest attraction in this city to turn up at on the wrong day. Its official page opens by telling you it is open throughout the year. Further down the same page, folded inside a dropdown you have to click, it tells you something rather more important.

Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and it is one click from invisible

Here is the sentence, taken from the opening times section of Royal Collection Trust's own page on 16 September 2026:

The Palace of Holyroodhouse is usually closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays except for Exclusive Guided Tours when you can tour the historic building with an expert guide when the Palace is closed to the wider public.

That accordion is collapsed when the page loads. You have to click Opening times to see it, which also means a plain fetch of the page never returns it. Meanwhile the first paragraph on the same page, the one that is visible immediately, says the palace is open throughout the year. Both statements are true in their own way, and together they are a trap: open all year, shut two days a week.

This is not our inference from one ambiguous line. The King's Gallery page, a separate page on the same official site, lists the Palace in its nearby panel as open Thursday to Monday. Two places, same operator, same answer.

The one exception is the Exclusive Guided Tour at £55 per person, a small group capped at 25 that runs on days the palace is closed to everyone else, with a guidebook included. It is expensive next to £22, and it is the only way through the door on a Tuesday.

What a ticket costs, and the band the Castle does not have

Straight from the official ticket page, read on 16 September 2026.

Two things in that table are worth more than they look. The first is that £4 gap. It is the steepest walk-up penalty of any major attraction we have priced in this city: Edinburgh Castle charges £2.50 more at the gate and the Royal Yacht Britannia charges £2. At Holyrood, not booking ahead costs an adult more than an audio guide at the castle.

The second is the Young Person band for 18 to 24 year olds, at £14.00. The castle has nothing equivalent: there you are an adult at 16 and you pay £23.50. So a twenty-year-old pays £14 here and £23.50 up the hill, and a family with a student in tow will find Holyrood the cheaper half of the day by a distance. Holyrood's child band also starts at 5, where the castle's starts at 7.

Opening times, and the instruction that contradicts the Castle

That winter last admission of 15:15 is the one to write down. Between November and March the palace stops letting people in at quarter past three, which in an Edinburgh December is barely after lunch and well before the light goes. Plan Holyrood as a morning or early afternoon, not as the thing you do after the museum.

And then the instruction that surprised us, because it is the operator's own and it points the other way from everything we wrote about the castle yesterday:

The Admission Centre is busiest from opening and throughout the morning. For the best experience please book your tickets in advance and arrive after 11:00.

At Edinburgh Castle the advice is to take the first slot of the day, because the place fills through the morning and is uncomfortable by early afternoon. At Holyrood, one mile downhill, the operator asks you to do the opposite. That is a genuinely useful pairing rather than a contradiction: castle first thing, walk the Royal Mile downhill, Holyrood after eleven. The two pieces of advice fit together into a single day rather than fighting each other.

What you can book elsewhere, which is almost nothing

Here is something no affiliate page will tell you willingly, so we will. You cannot buy standalone Holyrood admission on Viator. We searched it in GBP and the results came back full of Edinburgh Castle tours, ghost buses and Royal Mile walks. Royal Collection Trust sells entry itself and does not push plain admission out to the marketplaces the way Historic Environment Scotland does for the castle.

So for entry alone the answer is simple and it earns this site nothing: buy direct from rct.uk at £22. There is no cheaper route and no skip-the-line to buy, because the queue is an admission centre rather than a gate.

The one genuine third-party product is a combined guided tour of both royal buildings, and it is worth showing the arithmetic on it rather than just the price.

Cheapest, and we earn nothing

Palace of Holyroodhouse Standard Admission

Booked direct from Royal Collection Trust. Includes the State Apartments, the ruined abbey, the gardens and the audio guide. Convertible to a free 1-Year Pass on the day.

£22.00

In advance · per adult

Book on the official site →

If you want a guide for both

The Royal Tour: Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace and Royal Mile

★★★★★4.9 · 104 reviews

Five hours, both admission tickets included, small group of 18. The guiding works out at roughly the same hourly rate as the castle-only tours. See the caveat below about Holyrood.

from £99

5 hours · per adult

Check availability →

The arithmetic. That £99 includes both admissions, which are £23.50 at the castle and £22.00 here, so £45.50 of the price is tickets. The remaining £53.50 buys five hours of guiding, about £10.70 an hour. For comparison, the castle-only 90-minute tours at £39 leave £15.50 over the ticket, which is about £10.33 an hour. Near enough identical. Whatever else you conclude, the Royal Tour is not marked up relative to the market.

The caveat, which matters at this price. The operator's own description says that at Holyrood you will visit the palace at your own pace using the audio guide. So the guide takes you round the castle and the Royal Mile and then hands you over at the palace door. If you are paying £99 expecting a guided tour of the State Apartments, you are not getting one.

Two ways to pay a lot less

Neither of these appears in a single comparison table we found for this attraction, and one of them is the most generous thing in British heritage pricing.

The second is the 1-Year Pass. Royal Collection Trust lets you convert your standard ticket into unlimited re-admission to the palace for a year. If you live anywhere in Scotland or come back regularly, that turns a £22 visit into a season ticket for nothing. A £2 transaction fee applies when you pre-book a return visit.

There is also a combined ticket with The King's Gallery next door, running from 17 June to 6 December 2026 for the exhibition The Edwardians: Age of Elegance. The advertised discount is 10%, and unlike most such claims it is exactly right: the Palace is £22.00 and the Gallery is £11.00, so £33.00 apart against £29.70 together. It saves £3.30, which is worth having if you wanted the exhibition and is not a reason to add one.

The site that ranks fourth is not the official one

Search for this palace and the fourth organic result, on the day we checked, was palaceofholyroodhouse.co.uk. It is not the official site. The official operator is Royal Collection Trust at rct.uk, which holds the first result.

To be fair to them, that site says so itself, in a notice on its own homepage: it states it is not the Royal Collection Trust website, has no link or association with the palace or the royal family, and describes itself as an unofficial guide. That is a proper disclosure and more than some do. What it also has is the exact-match domain, which is why it outranks the King's own website at royal.uk, and a page title that still describes the palace as the Scottish Residence of Queen Elizabeth II, four years after the accession.

The practical point is the same one we made about castle tickets: the domain that looks most official usually is not. For this attraction the official address is rct.uk and nothing else. We are a third party too, this page carries affiliate links, and that is exactly why the recommendation above is to buy direct.

What the £22 actually gets you

More than the state rooms, which is where people underestimate it. The ticket includes the State Apartments, the chambers associated with Mary, Queen of Scots, the Great Gallery, the Throne Room, the ruins of Holyrood Abbey and the palace gardens, plus the audio guide, which unlike the castle's £4 guide is not an extra.

Allow two hours, more if the weather lets you walk the gardens properly. And note where you are standing: Holyrood Park and Arthur's Seat begin immediately behind the palace, which means the single best free thing in Edinburgh starts at the exit of the most expensive royal one. If you are building a day plan, that pairing costs nothing and saves a journey.

About this guide

Written by Diego Fresno, Independent travel writer and researcher. Prices, opening times, the Tuesday and Wednesday closure and the £1 ticket scheme on this page were read directly from rct.uk on 16 September 2026, with the closure confirmed in two separate places on that site. The opening times sit inside a collapsed section that a plain page fetch does not return, so it was opened in a real browser. The King's Gallery price used in the combined-ticket sum came from its own official page. Tour price, inclusions and review count came from a live Viator lookup in GBP. Not claimed: any royal-residence closure dates beyond the ones Royal Collection Trust publishes, or anything about the unofficial guide site beyond what it states about itself. This page carries affiliate links and still tells you to buy admission direct, because there is no cheaper way to buy it. Verified: August 2026. About the author →