Metropolitan Museum, New York: opening hours and the best time to visit

The Metropolitan Museum's main building, The Met Fifth Avenue, is open 10 am to 5 pm on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and 10 am to 9 pm on Friday and Saturday. It is closed every Wednesday. The Met Cloisters, the medieval branch in Fort Tryon Park, keeps the same Wednesday closure, opens at 10 am, and closes at 5 pm from March to October and at 4:30 pm from November to February. These are the hours the museum published on its Plan Your Visit page as of September 2026.

The best time to go depends on what you mean. For the museum itself, any open day works, and the museum publishes no crowd data to say otherwise. For New York around it, the calendar matters a lot: the 30-year climate normals below show where a morning in the galleries and an afternoon in Central Park fit together, and where the park is better saved for another trip.

Two things trip people up. The first is Wednesday. Plenty of guides online still say the Met closes on Mondays, which stopped being true in 2013, when it began opening seven days a week, or on Tuesdays, which was a pandemic-era schedule. Today the closed day is Wednesday, and it applies to both sites and to the museum's cafés. If Wednesday is your only free day, see the Wednesday plan in our itineraries page.

Both Met sites are closed every Wednesday, all year. If your trip includes one Wednesday, that is the day for another museum, not for the Met.

The second is the Cloisters' winter hours. The museum switches to a 4:30 pm closing on November 1 and back to 5 pm on March 1. That half hour matters because the Cloisters sit about six miles north of the main building, and one ticket covers both sites on the same day. On a winter day, do the Cloisters first. The reasons, and the routes, are on our getting-there page.

Besides every Wednesday, the Met Fifth Avenue closes on four days a year: Thanksgiving Day, December 25, January 1 and the first Monday in May. The May closure is for the Costume Institute benefit, which the museum's own calendar lists simply as the Met Gala. The Cloisters close on Thanksgiving, December 25 and January 1, but not on the first Monday in May, so on that Monday the Cloisters are the only Met site you can visit.

Other public holidays are ordinary open days. Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Presidents' Day do not appear among the closures in the museum's schedule for 2026, so they follow the normal hours for their weekday (and a holiday that falls on a Wednesday is closed anyway). We read that schedule in September 2026; the museum can add a closure at short notice, and it does.

Short-notice closures also happen inside the building. The museum states that it does not guarantee access to every gallery at all times, and it lists current closures on its gallery closures page. In the last days of September 2026, for example, the museum's CMS marked the gallery of the Temple of Dendur closed, together with a dozen other Egyptian galleries and no reason given; on September 29 Dendur was open again while some of the others were still shut. Closures come and go within days, so if there is one room you are crossing an ocean for, check that page the day before. The routes on our what-to-see page say which areas are closed for longer renovations.

The museum publishes none. Some third-party sites say entry stops 30 minutes before closing; we found no such rule in the museum's own text. In practice the question answers itself: the building is over two million square feet, and arriving 45 minutes before a 5 pm closing buys you one wing at a jog. If you can only come late, come on a Friday or Saturday, when you get four more hours.

Most guides get this part wrong. The museum publishes nothing about its busiest or quietest times. We searched every current visitor page in its content system in September 2026 and found no statement about crowded days, quiet hours or evening crowds. When a site tells you "Tuesday mornings are quietest" or "the Met is empty on Friday nights", it is repeating folklore, and a few of those pages also recommend Wednesday mornings, the one time the museum is shut.

What we can do is reason from the facts the museum does publish:

• Most visitors are local. In fiscal year 2025 local visitors were 62 percent of the total and out-of-state American visitors 23 percent, according to the museum's attendance release. Locals come when they are free, so weekends and public holidays carry the weight of the city's own visitors on top of the tourists.
• Friday and Saturday have four extra hours. The same number of people spread over eleven hours instead of seven should thin out. Whether it does on a given night depends on what else is on, and nobody publishes the figures.
• Groups register in advance. All groups of ten or more and every third-party guided tour must book with the museum. School groups follow the school calendar, so expect them on weekday mornings between September and June, not in July and August.
• Big openings pull crowds. The public opening day of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, May 31, 2025, drew 33,700 visitors, the museum's highest single day since 2017. The first weeks of a major exhibition behave the same way.
• Rain moves people indoors. A museum this size is the obvious rainy-day plan for locals and tourists alike, so a wet Saturday is the combination we would avoid.

The one queue the museum itself warns about is security. Every visitor and every member passes a bag check at the entrance, and the visitor guidelines ask you to plan for lines there. Buying a ticket online lets you walk from security straight to a gallery entrance, but it does not shorten the security line, and no product can. Our rules and bags page explains what slows that check down.

Our rule of thumb, which is reasoning and not data: arrive at 10 am, when the building opens, and see the most requested rooms first, or come after 5 pm on a Friday or Saturday, when the day visitors head out. Note that on Saturday and Sunday members already have the building from 9 am (a membership perk, September 2026), so the 10 am opening is not an empty museum on weekends. On late evenings most museum cafés closed at 8 pm in September 2026, an hour before the galleries (current times on the museum's dining page).

The Met is indoors and climate-controlled, so the weather only decides what you do before and after. The table gives the official NOAA climate normals for 1991-2020 at the Central Park weather station, which stands by Belvedere Castle, about a third of a mile west of the museum. Figures are 30-year averages as published by NOAA; Celsius and millimetres are our conversions.

Read the table as a visitor rather than a meteorologist and a few things stand out. First, New York has no dry season. Rain days sit between 8.8 (September) and 11.5 (May) every month, roughly one day in three, so an umbrella belongs in the bag in any month. September is the driest by count and also one of the most comfortable, with an average high of 76.2 °F (24.6 °C).

Second, July and August are hot and wet. Average highs of 84.9 °F and 83.3 °F in Central Park do not capture the humidity, and those two months bring 4.6 inches of rain each, often as short afternoon storms. That is when a long museum morning and a short park walk in the evening make sense.

Third, snow is a January and February affair: 8.8 and 10.1 inches on average, with about two days a month of an inch or more. December averages under 5 inches. Snow and ice make the uphill walk to the Cloisters through Fort Tryon Park slippery, which is one more reason to take the bus for the last stretch in winter.

A note on shelf life. These are the current official normals, and NOAA replaces them every ten years. On that cycle the next set, covering 2001-2030, should come out around 2031; until NOAA publishes it, these remain the official US reference.

Daylight matters more than people think, because both Met sites close in the afternoon on most days. The times below are for the 15th of each month at Central Park, computed with NOAA's solar algorithm and checked against the US Naval Observatory, which agrees to within a minute. They move by a minute or so from one year to the next, so treat them as typical for any year.

Two consequences for a visit. In December the sun sets at about 4:29 pm, the minute the Cloisters close for the day, so the walk back through Fort Tryon Park to the subway happens at dusk; start earlier if that bothers you. In June, by contrast, a Friday at the Met Fifth Avenue ends at 9 pm with sunset only half an hour behind you, and the steps on Fifth Avenue are still warm.

The matrix reads the museums the other way round from the walks. The Met's best months are the ones when New York is hardest on foot: in January and February a whole day inside at 70 °F beats a frozen park. The Cloisters are the exception because they are half garden. The Met's own garden notes say the herbs and flowers of the three cloister gardens are at their peak in late spring and early summer, and that in winter the covered walkways become a conservatory of potted plants, so a January visit is not wasted, just different. For the full Cloisters visit, see our Cloisters guide.

If you can choose freely, pick late April to early June or mid-September to early November. Average highs in those windows run from the upper 50s to the upper 70s °F (about 14-26 °C), the park is worth an afternoon, and the Cloisters' gardens are either in full growth or still going. The catch: these are also the months most visitors pick.

If your dates are fixed, no month rules the Met out. December brings the shortest days and the holiday weeks, when locals on vacation fill museums; January and February bring the coldest weather and, in our reading, the strongest case for spending a full day inside. Summer rewards an early start: the museum at 10 am, the park before the heat or after 6 pm.

Price has no season here. Admission is the same in every month, and the pay-what-you-wish rules for New York residents do not change with the calendar; our admission page has the details.