Hoi An Old Town Ticket 2026: What 120,000 VND Actually Buys

The question comes up in the car more than any other, usually somewhere around the last roundabout: do we have to pay to go into the Old Town? It is a fair question with an awkward answer, because the rule and the practice are not the same thing, and almost everything written about it in English is a year or two out of date.

Here is what we tell people while we are still driving.

Do you actually need a ticket for Hội An Old Town?

To go inside the ticketed monuments — the merchant houses, the assembly halls, the museums, Chùa Cầu — yes. To walk the streets, eat, drink coffee, shop for a shirt and photograph the yellow walls, in practice no.

That gap has a history. In April 2023 Hội An announced that from 15 May 2023 every visitor, Vietnamese or foreign, would have to buy a ticket at the booths before entering the heritage quarter. The announcement travelled further than the policy did. Within days the city clarified how it would actually work: enforcement concentrates on organised groups arriving with a guide, while independent visitors coming in to eat or take photographs are not compelled. Tuổi Trẻ carried the city's own formulation — that Hội An still charges admission, but "not everyone who enters is charged."

So the honest position: the ticket is not a turnstile on the town. It is admission to the monuments, and it is the mechanism by which the streets you are walking through stay standing. Which brings us to what it costs.

What does 120,000 VND buy?

120,000 VND for foreign visitors — about 4.80 USD — and 80,000 VND for Vietnamese visitors, around 3.20 USD. Children under one metre are free; between one metre and 1.4 metres the counters post a reduced rate of roughly 50,000 VND.

The foreign ticket admits five heritage sites of your choosing; the domestic ticket admits three. You choose from a published list of more than twenty, grouped roughly like this:

• Landmark structures — Chùa Cầu (the Japanese Covered Bridge), Miếu Quan Công, Đình Cẩm Phô, Tụy Tiên Đường Minh Hương
• Merchant houses — Tấn Ký, Phùng Hưng, Quân Thắng, Đức An
• Family chapels — nhà thờ tộc Trần, nhà thờ tộc Nguyễn Tường
• Assembly halls — Phúc Kiến (Fujian), Quảng Đông (Cantonese), Triều Châu (Chaozhou), Hải Nam (Hainan)
• Museums — Bảo tàng Hội An, Gốm sứ Mậu dịch (trade ceramics), Văn hóa Sa Huỳnh, Văn hóa Dân gian

It is a day ticket, used flexibly across the 24 hours from your first check-in. That matters more than it sounds: it means a morning of houses and a return after dark to the same ticket, which is exactly how we schedule Old Town days. Nobody obliges you to spend all five.

Which five are worth spending?

If you only walk in once, this is the set that gives you five genuinely different things rather than five variations on carved wood.

Chùa Cầu first, because it is the town's signature and because it is newly itself again. The bridge came down for restoration on 28 December 2022 and went back up over 19 months, at a cost of more than 20.2 billion VND split evenly between the provincial and city budgets. It was inaugurated on 3 August 2024. The finish drew loud argument when the scaffolding came off — too new, too bright — and two years of weather have already begun settling that debate.

Hội quán Phúc Kiến for the most ornate interior in town. Nhà cổ Tấn Ký for the best-explained merchant house, where the flood marks on the interior wall tell you more about Hội An than any placard. Bảo tàng Gốm sứ Mậu dịch for the reason the town exists at all — the trade ceramics that came through this river mouth. And one quiet one: nhà thờ tộc Trần, a family chapel behind a garden wall, usually near-empty while forty people queue at the bridge.

Where are the booths, and when do they sell?

Roughly ten ticket booths ring the heritage grid, sitting at the entrances on Trần Phú, Nguyễn Thái Học, Bạch Đằng, Lê Lợi, Nguyễn Huệ and Hoàng Diệu. Selling hours run 07:30 to 21:30 in the summer season and to about 21:00 in winter. The heritage centre also sells online, which skips the counter queue on a hot afternoon.

Keep the stub after you have used your five. It is the counterfoil the door staff read, and it saves the conversation at the next entrance.

When do the streets close to vehicles, and where can a car stop?

Trần Phú, Nguyễn Thái Học and Bạch Đằng run as pedestrian and non-motorised streets roughly 09:00–11:00 and 15:00–21:30, every day. Outside those windows motorbikes return, which is its own kind of closure.

For a car the rule is simpler: no car enters the heritage grid at any hour. Your driver stops at the perimeter — usually Nguyễn Huệ, Hoàng Diệu or the Bạch Đằng riverside end — and from any of those you are at the bridge in five to eight minutes on foot. What matters is the other half of the arrangement: agree a pickup corner and a rough time before you step out. Inside the grid there is nowhere for the car to appear, and phone directions to a street that cars cannot use are a slow way to end a good afternoon.

Drive times to that perimeter: from Hội An hotels 5–10 minutes; from central Đà Nẵng about 30 km and 45 minutes; from Đà Nẵng airport 35–45 minutes depending on the hour; from the Marble Mountains, which sit halfway, 25–30 minutes.

The timing we recommend: be dropped at 08:00, do the houses and museums while the light is low and the doorways are empty, and be out before the 11:00 heat. Come back at 17:00 for the lanterns. The 11:30–15:00 stretch belongs to a beach or a long lunch, not to stone courtyards.

What does the ticket money actually do?

More than most visitors assume. Old Town admissions brought in around 196 billion VND in 2025, with the management centre targeting 220–240 billion for 2026. Of that, 55% goes to the state budget for restoration and conservation work and 45% stays with the centre that runs the sites.

The mechanism behind it dates to 1995, when Hội An began part-funding the repair of privately owned heritage houses: between 40% and 75% of the cost depending on the building's grade and position — up to 60% for a street-front monument, up to 75% for one down a lane — running to roughly 5–7 billion VND a year. The 30-hectare core holds more than 800 monuments, including 139 old houses, 18 assembly halls and 11 family chapels, and it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1999. A family living in a 200-year-old timber house on Trần Phú is not maintaining it out of sentiment alone.

One footnote on addresses: since 1 July 2025, the old wards of Minh An, Cẩm Phô, Sơn Phong and Cẩm Nam and the commune of Cẩm Kim have been merged into a single phường Hội An, now within Đà Nẵng city rather than Quảng Nam province. Booking forms and older maps are still catching up. The booths have not moved.

If you want an Old Town day driven properly — the early drop, the perimeter pickup, the beach in the dead hours and back for the lanterns — tell us the day at hoiandriver.com/quote. A real driver prices it, and 10% books it.