If seeing the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace sculptures, the 24 grand baroque paintings of the Medici Gallery, and the lavish apartments of Napoleon III are on your 2026 wish list, you should factor in a higher budget to visit the world’s biggest and most-visited art museum.
The Louvre announced that beginning January 14, 2026, admission for visitors from outside of the European Economic Area (EEA)—including Americans—will rise to €32 (or US$38, based on current conversion rates), a 45 percent increase from the current €22 ticket. It’s the museum’s steepest price jump in years and marks the first time the institution has created a formal price distinction between EEA and non-EEA travelers.
The price will remain at €22 for citizens of the 30 EEA countries, including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.
For the Louvre, the added revenue is part of a sweeping, years-long modernization effort aimed at restoring the historic palace turned museum, updating security, improving how roughly 9 million visitors a year interact with the space, and rethinking how its massive collections are presented.
“The Louvre will be redesigned and restored to become the epicenter of art history for our country and beyond,” French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters at a press conference in January 2025.
Macron’s announcement came days after Le Parisien reported that the Louvre’s director had warned in a confidential memo to the French Culture Ministry of “the stark reality of the state of our overused buildings,” many of which “are reaching a worrying level of obsolescence.” The notice also detailed the ailments threatening the famed structure, including damage in spaces that are “sometimes severely degraded” or even “no longer watertight,” as well as “alarming temperature fluctuations that endanger the preservation of the artworks.”
While the plans to update have been in motion for nearly a year, the urgency increased after a brazen heist in October 2025, when thieves disguised as maintenance workers slipped into the museum’s Galerie d’Apollon (Apollo Gallery) and escaped with eight pieces of the priceless royal jewels in a matter of minutes, revealing gaps in the museum’s surveillance network.
The cost of the updates is estimated at up to €800 million (roughly US$941 million).
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa draws huge crowds from around the world.
Photo by Alicia Steele/Unsplash
A new home for the Mona Lisa
One of the most significant updates underway: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa will soon receive a dedicated gallery, addressing years of crowding and bottlenecks around the Renaissance icon. Museum officials hope that moving the painting into its own purpose-built exhibition space will ease congestion elsewhere in the museum and provide a more intentional, less chaotic viewing experience.
“Every day, this very room is a scene of intense agitation,” Louvre Director Laurence des Cars said of the gallery where the Mona Lisa currently hangs, speaking at the same January 2025 press conference where Macron announced the museum’s forthcoming renovations.
The painting’s new home will have its own dedicated entrance—requiring a separate ticket, the price of which hasn’t yet been announced—on the museum’s eastern side, near the Seine River. The dedicated gallery is expected to be completed by 2031.
The history of the Louvre—a constant work in progress
Today, the Louvre’s collection spans nearly 500,000 works, with approximately 35,000 on display. Its galleries map out a vast timeline of human creativity: ancient Near Eastern reliefs, Roman sculptures, French Romantic canvases, Islamic ceramics, and, of course, the museum’s marquee masterpieces. Protecting and presenting that scope of material requires constant reinvestment.
The museum’s origins date back to the late 12th century, when King Philip II ordered the construction of a fortified castle on the banks of the Seine to defend Paris against Viking invasions. Portions of this medieval foundation still exist and can be viewed in the museum’s lower levels. Over the centuries, successive monarchs renovated and expanded the complex, transforming the fortress into a Renaissance palace, and by the mid-1600s, the Louvre had become the symbolic seat of royal power—even though Louis XIV later decamped to Versailles.
In 1793, amid the political upheaval of the French Revolution, the palace was officially converted into a public museum intended to house the nation’s art treasures. Though it opened with only about 500 pieces, mostly confiscated from the royal family and French nobility, that moment marked the beginning of the Louvre as we know it today. The addition of I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid in 1989—controversial at first—cemented the museum’s modern identity and dramatically improved visitor access.
