Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: Benoit Durand / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP 12:50 p.m., January 15, 2024

This Monday, January 15, the price of the entrance ticket to the Louvre will increase from 17 to 22 euros. An increase of 29% that would be linked to the increase in the cost of energy, explains the museum. In 2023, the Parisian museum, which is the most visited in the world, welcomed 8.9 million visitors.

Culture is not immune to inflation. This Monday, February 15, the price of the entrance ticket to the Louvre Museum will increase from 17 to 22 euros. An increase that the cultural establishment had announced last December. The museum, which remains the most visited in the world with 8.9 million visitors in 2023, justified this increase by the cost of energy prices. Its ticket sales brought in €76.5 million last year, according to the annual report. This covered only a quarter of its operating costs, the rest being financed by appropriations from the Ministry of Culture and other resources, including patronage.

Some visitors can benefit from free admission

However, the largest museum in the world remains free for "more than one in two French visitors", the museum assures. Visitors under the age of 25, job seekers, recipients of minimum social benefits, the disabled and their companions, teachers, and cultural professionals and journalists are concerned by this free admission. Of the estimated 8.7 million visitors in 2023, 3.6 million of them (41%) would not have paid an entrance fee.

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Through this increase in tickets, the museum hopes to finance in the coming years a project to open a second entrance, in addition to the one under the Pyramid inaugurated in 1988, which is now saturated. It would be done by the east façade, at the level of the Louvre-Rivoli metro station. The timeline and cost are not known. The Louvre is also continuing to acquire works of art and hopes to expand its cultural programming.