Notre-Dame Tickets and Tours

Since the cathedral reopened in December 2024, entry to Notre-Dame is free. The cathedral describes itself as open to all, freely and without charge, and free reservation slots are offered only on the official notredamedeparis.fr website, with no intermediaries authorised. So nobody needs to buy a ticket to walk in, and any listing that implies otherwise is selling you something you already have.

What you can pay for is a guide. The Notre-Dame Cathedral guided tour, from €21, is a one-hour small-group walk limited to five participants with a certified guide, covering both the exterior and the newly restored interior. It starts on the Parvis in front of the west facade, where the guide reads the portals and the sculpture before you go inside, then continues through the nave to look at the restoration work, the reopened chapels and the stained glass.

Be clear about one thing before you book: this tour does not include skip-the-line access. The listing states plainly that you queue in the general entry line alongside your guide, that no advance ticket reservation is needed to enter, and that you should expect to wait 10 to 20 minutes. You are paying for expertise and a group of five, not for a shortcut.

Worth it if: you care about the architecture and the restoration story, you want the facade and the portals decoded rather than photographed, or you would otherwise walk the nave in ten minutes without knowing what you were looking at. At €21 for an hour with a certified guide in a group of five, it is one of the cheapest guided experiences in central Paris, and the group size is genuinely small rather than nominally small.

Skip it if: you mainly want to see the interior and take photographs, or you are on a tight schedule. General entry is free and the queue moves; you can be in and out inside half an hour with no booking at all. The tower climb is a separate ticketed experience run by the national monuments authority and is not part of this tour.

Either way, get there early. The Parvis fills from mid-morning, and the shortest waits are at opening and in the last hour of the day. The cathedral sits at 6 Parvis Notre-Dame, Place Jean-Paul II, on the Ile de la Cite in the 4th arrondissement, a two-minute walk from Cite metro station on line 4. Many Seine river cruises pass directly beneath it, which is the other free-ish way to see the building.