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destination · Venice
Venice in 2026: the entry fee runs 60 days, costs 5 or 10 euros, and fewer than 48,000 people still live in the old city
Review of Venice
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Share your experienceVenice is the rare destination where the crowding problem is not an opinion, it is arithmetic. The historic centre, the actual island city everyone comes to see, is down to 47,995 residents and has lost more than 120,000 people from the main island since the 1950s. On a normal day that shrinking population shares its streets with roughly 25,000 overnight tourists plus another 15,000 to 25,000 day-trippers, and on peak days the day-tripper count has been put as high as 85,000. Venice took 5,876,797 official accommodation arrivals in 2024, and that figure does not count the people who arrive in the morning and leave at night, which is the group the city has spent three years trying to price down. The policy response is the access fee, and in 2026 it is bigger than it has ever been. The contributo di accesso applies on 60 days between April and July: every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 3 April through 26 July, plus 6 April, the whole week from 27 April, and the whole week from 1 June. It is charged between 08:30 and 16:00 and it costs 5 euros if you book more than three days ahead, 10 euros if you leave it later than that. Overnight guests and residents are exempt, though overnight guests still have to register. The 2025 run raised 5,421,425 euros from 723,497 paying visitors, up from 2.4 million euros and 485,062 payments in 2024 when the scheme only ran 29 days. Almost half of everyone who paid, 49 per cent, paid the penalty rate of 10 euros because they did not book in advance. That is the single most avoidable cost in Venice and half of visitors still walk into it. What the fee has not done is thin the crowds. Revenue nearly doubled; the queues at the Rialto and San Marco did not halve. Venice has also already banned large cruise ships from the lagoon, back in 2021, and the number of people standing in Piazza San Marco on an August afternoon is still the number it always was. The other Venice tax is informal and much larger. Restaurant overcharging in the streets immediately around Piazza San Marco is systematic rather than occasional: tourist-facing places within sight of the Basilica routinely charge multiples of what an equivalent meal costs one bridge inland, and the mechanics are usually a coperto, a service charge, and fish or steak priced by the etto so the menu number is not the number on the bill. Gondolas are the other documented pressure point. Rates are officially posted by the gondoliers' association, and operators do sometimes charge above them or add undisclosed surcharges, so the fix is to know the posted rate before you get in the boat. Getting around is expensive by design. A single vaporetto ride is 9.50 euros, which is one of the most expensive single public transport tickets in Europe, and a 24-hour pass is 25 euros. If you are doing more than two boat trips in a day the pass wins immediately; if you are staying in the centre and walking, you may barely need the boats at all. The seasonal risk is acqua alta. High-water season starts in late October and periodic flooding is possible through January when tide and weather line up. Individual events last roughly two to four hours around high tide and then drain away, and the MOSE barrier system now closes off the extreme events that used to put a metre of water through the city. Vaporetto service can be suspended on some sections while it is happening. It is an inconvenience to plan around now, not the catastrophe of 2019. None of that touches what Venice actually is. It is a city built on water with no cars in it, a functioning UNESCO-listed medieval-to-Renaissance urban fabric, and once you are more than about ten minutes' walk from San Marco the crowds thin out sharply and the prices come back to earth. The people who leave Venice disappointed are overwhelmingly the ones who spent one day inside the 400-metre radius that the entire planet is standing in.
What was great
There is no substitute for it. A car-free city on water, a thousand years of architecture on the Grand Canal, and a scale small enough to cross on foot in an hour. The crowd problem is also geographically narrow: Cannaregio, Castello and the Giudecca are quiet within a ten-minute walk of the tourist core, and that is where the ordinary-priced restaurants and the actual Venetians are. Large cruise ships have been banned from the lagoon since 2021, and MOSE now stops the extreme floods that used to shut the city down.
What nearly ruined the trip
The residents are leaving. Venice's historic centre is down to 47,995 people, having lost over 120,000 from the main island since the 1950s, while up to 85,000 day-trippers can arrive in a single day. The city's own answer, the access fee, raised 5.42 million euros in 2025 and did not visibly reduce crowding. Around San Marco, restaurant overcharging is systematic rather than occasional, gondola surcharges above the posted rate are a documented pattern, and a single vaporetto ticket costs 9.50 euros. Almost half of fee-payers pay double because they did not book three days out.
Safety
★★★★☆ Mostly fineValue for money
★★☆☆☆ OverpricedMore from Venice
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