What to see at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in two hours, half a day or a day

Two hours at the Metropolitan Museum is enough for one floor done properly. It is not enough for the building. Take the first-floor route through Egypt, the arms and armor court and the American Wing, or the second-floor route through European paintings, from Caravaggio and Vermeer to Van Gogh. Half a day, about four hours, joins the two. A full day adds Greek and Roman art, the Asian galleries, musical instruments and the African, Oceanic and ancient American galleries, and you will still walk past whole departments: the Fifth Avenue building has about 450 numbered galleries in the museum's own records.

Every work on these routes was checked on September 29, 2026 against the museum's collection database, which gives a gallery number for a work on view and none for a work in storage or out on loan. Two famous pictures failed that test on the day: El Greco's View of Toledo and Cézanne's The Card Players had no gallery number, so neither appears below. At the Met, even the permanent collection moves around.

Galleries at the Met close at short notice, sometimes for a day or two and without an explanation. The Temple of Dendur was marked closed in the museum's gallery records from September 26, 2026 and was listed as open again on the morning of the 29th, New York time. Check the museum's Gallery Closures page on the morning you go, and keep a second choice in mind for every stop.

Choose a floor and stay on it. The Great Hall, where you enter from Fifth Avenue, sits between the two routes: Egypt opens to the right (north) on the first floor, and the main staircase takes you straight up into European paintings. Crossing between floors and wings is where a short visit leaks time, so each route below makes only one change of level.

The minutes are our estimates for looking, not for walking. Add about a quarter again for moving between rooms, finding a bench and the inevitable detour around a school group. Numbers in the second column are the museum's gallery numbers, which are printed at the doorways and are the fastest way to navigate.

Route A works for first-time visitors and for families (our guide to the Met with kids adapts it). Most commercial tours cover something close to it, which is worth knowing if you plan to book one later in the trip. The objects: Perneb, the Meketre granary, William, the Temple of Dendur, Henry VIII's field armor, the 1527 garniture, the Sullivan staircase, the Wright room, Leutze's painting and Madame X.

Route B is for people who came for painting. It starts at the top of the Great Hall staircase and ends in the rooms of 19th-century French art, which are the most crowded part of the floor on weekends. Do them last only if you are visiting on a Friday or Saturday evening; otherwise, reverse the table and start with Van Gogh.

Links to the museum's own records for route B: The Musicians, Juan de Pareja, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, The Death of Socrates, The Harvesters, The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, Wheat Field with Cypresses, Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat and Circus Sideshow. Each page shows the gallery where the work hangs today, or says it is not on view.

Four hours lets you do both floors without rushing, with a twenty-minute break in the middle. The half-day route starts in the Greek and Roman galleries on the south side of the Great Hall and crosses the building through the medieval galleries to Egypt and the American Wing, so the whole first floor is done before lunch. The afternoon belongs to the paintings upstairs.

Two stops are added to the two-hour routes. The marble kouros in gallery 154 is one of the earliest marble statues of a human figure carved in Attica, about 590-580 BC. The bedroom from the villa at Boscoreale in gallery 165 is a painted Roman room of about 50-40 BC, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, more than a century after it was decorated. On the way to Egypt, stop in gallery 300 for the Antioch "Chalice", a silver object of about 500-550 that the museum titles with quotation marks around the word chalice. It belongs to the Cloisters collection but hangs on Fifth Avenue.

A full day means six to eight hours inside, and on most days the building does not give you eight: Fifth Avenue opens 10 am to 5 pm on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, stays open until 9 pm on Friday and Saturday, and is closed on Wednesday (hours as published in September 2026; see our opening hours page). If you want the whole list below, go on a Friday or Saturday and eat lunch at a normal hour, not at 3 pm.

The full-day route is the half-day route plus five areas that commercial tours rarely reach. The Astor Court in gallery 217 is a Ming-style garden court in the Asian wing. Bartolomeo Cristofori's 1720 grand piano in gallery 684 was made by the man who invented the instrument. The Studiolo from Gubbio (gallery 501) is a small study lined in wood inlay, and the Vélez Blanco Patio (gallery 534) is a two-story Spanish Renaissance courtyard carved in marble. The galleries of Africa, Oceania and the ancient Americas in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing reopened on May 31, 2025 after a rebuild.

Two works in that table need a date next to them. The modern and contemporary galleries are closed while the new wing is built, but on September 29, 2026, the collection database still placed Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) in gallery 899 and Picasso's Gertrude Stein in gallery 965, in the Robert Lehman Wing. Both rooms are used for temporary displays, and works in them move when the museum needs the space, so look both up before you walk over.

If you would rather split the day, your ticket covers both Met locations on the same date, and you can leave and come back in. The Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park makes a good afternoon, within two limits. It closes at 5 pm (4:30 pm from November to February), and getting there takes about an hour door to door by subway (A train to 190 St, then a walk through the park) or about 1 hour 25 minutes on the M4 bus, the museum's own estimate. Our Cloisters guide has the route.

This is the part of the page that goes out of date first, so every line carries its date. "The Museum cannot guarantee access to all galleries at all times," say the rules the Met writes for tour groups, and a few days of its gallery records bear that out. The Temple of Dendur was marked closed from September 26, 2026, with no reason given, and listed as open again on the morning of the 29th, New York time. By that evening five Egyptian rooms of the early New Kingdom (116-120) were marked closed. Four other galleries (168, 540, 719, 813) had been switched to closed on September 27.

The longer closures are announced and stable. The Assyrian reliefs and the winged bulls of the Ancient Near East galleries (400-406) are off view while the rooms are rebuilt; the museum has announced their reopening for 2027 as galleries of Ancient West Asian and Cypriot art; the collection database gives the famous lamassu no gallery at all. Most of the modern and contemporary galleries (900-925) are shut for the construction of the Tang Wing, which the museum has announced for 2030. The Cantor Roof Garden had its last season in 2025, ending on October 19; the museum's roof garden announcement says an expanded garden will open with the new wing in 2030, on its fourth floor.

1. Open the museum's Gallery Closures page. It is the page the museum itself points tour organizers to.
2. Look up the two or three works you care about most in the collection search. The object page gives the gallery number where the work hangs, or says it is not on view.
3. Ask at the information desk in the Great Hall when you arrive. Staff may know about same-day closures that have not reached the website yet.
4. Do not plan around a tour listing. Listings are written weeks or months ahead; our analysis of the tours found several that still name closed galleries.

Pick the route with the thing you would hate to miss. Plenty of people would mind missing the Temple of Dendur more than the Rembrandts; someone who flew in for Vermeer will feel the opposite. Some rules of thumb:

• First visit, two hours, mixed group: route A. It has the biggest objects and the fewest stairs.
• You came for painting: route B, and add the American Wing paintings (760, 771) if you have twenty minutes left.
• Friday or Saturday evening: route B after 5 pm, when day-trippers and school groups have gone. The museum publishes no crowd figures, so this is observation only.
• Wednesday: no route. The Fifth Avenue building and the Cloisters are both closed.
• You would rather be guided: most tours sold online last two hours and follow something close to route A plus the European paintings. Our page on how to choose a Met tour explains what the listings leave out.

The free audio guide works with any of these routes: stops and transcripts are on the museum's website and in the Bloomberg Connects app, so bring headphones.

Stop before you are tired. People who try to do the building in one push tend to walk through the last hour without seeing anything. A few habits help. Sit down every 45 minutes, even for five; the galleries have benches, and the big courts (the American Wing's Engelhard Court, the European sculpture court) are good places to reset. Keep water in a sealed bottle, which is the only drink the museum lets you carry. And pick your sacrifice before you set off: know which stop goes if the clock runs short, so the choice isn't made in front of the Vermeers.

Bags matter more than people expect: large bags and luggage are not allowed in the building or at the coat check, and small backpacks must be worn on your front or carried in your hand. Our rules and bags page has the details.