Royal Palace Amsterdam: Tickets, Hours and What Is Inside

The building on the Dam was never meant to be a palace. It was built in the 1650s as Amsterdam’s city hall, at a moment when the city was probably the richest place in Europe and wanted a building to prove it. Napoleon’s brother turned it into a royal residence in 1808 and it has stayed one ever since. From €13,50 with an audio tour included, and 4.7 out of 5 from more than eleven hundred visitors.

A town hall, not a palace

Jacob van Campen designed it, building started in 1648 and the city moved in seventeen years later. Contemporaries called it the eighth wonder of the world, and they were not entirely joking: it stands on 13,659 wooden piles driven into the marsh, a number every Dutch schoolchild is taught by being told to remember the year 1666 with a one in front and a nine behind.

The point of the building was civic self-confidence rather than royal grandeur. Amsterdam had no king, no court and no cathedral; what it had was a merchant government that wanted a hall as impressive as any palace in Europe, decorated not with saints but with maps, gods of trade and allegories of good governance. That is what makes it unusual, and it is the thing to look for as you walk round.

In 1808 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, installed as King of Holland by his brother, requisitioned the city hall as his residence. The Dutch royal family kept it after he left. It is still a working palace: the King uses it for state visits, receptions and the annual awards, and it closes to visitors when he does.

	Royal Palace Amsterdam
Address	Dam, 1012 RJ Amsterdam
Opening hours	Daily 10:00–18:00 on the days it is open — more than 230 days a year
Closures	It shuts at short notice for state occasions. Always check the calendar before you go
Price	From €13,50. Under-18s free; students €9
Rating	4.7 out of 5, from more than 1,100 reviews
Included	An audio tour, in every ticket
How long	An hour to an hour and a half
Built	1648–1665, by Jacob van Campen, as the city hall
Getting there	On Dam Square. Tram 2, 12, 13, 14 or 17, or ten minutes on foot from Central Station

Check availability and book the Royal Palace

What you see inside

The route runs through the state rooms on the main floor. These are the parts worth slowing down for:

• The Citizens’ Hall — the reason to come. A vast marble hall built as a covered public square, with the two hemispheres and the northern sky inlaid in the floor, so that a citizen of Amsterdam stood literally on top of the world. It is one of the great rooms in Europe and almost nobody outside the Netherlands knows it exists.
• The Tribunal — the room where death sentences were pronounced, on the ground floor, with a marble relief of judgment above the judges. The condemned were led straight out to a scaffold on the Dam.
• The Council Chamber — where the city government met, hung with paintings commissioned to remind the burgomasters what they were supposed to be.
• The royal apartments — Empire furniture left by Louis Napoleon, the largest collection of its kind outside France, and a complete change of tone from the seventeenth-century rooms.
• The Vierschaar and the galleries — sculpture by Artus Quellinus throughout, which is the other reason art historians rate the building so highly.

Is it worth it?

At €13,50 it is one of the best-value tickets in the centre, and it is the only major building on the Dam you can go inside. The 4.7 rating is unusually high for a historic house, and the audio tour is genuinely good.

The caveat is expectation. If you are picturing Versailles, this is not that: it is a seventeenth-century civic building with a royal layer added later, and the pleasure of it is architectural and historical rather than decorative. People who read a little before going come out impressed. People who wander in expecting gold and chandeliers sometimes do not.

It pairs well with the Rijksmuseum, because the paintings there and the building here were made by the same city in the same decades, for the same reasons.

Practical points

• Check the calendar. This is the one thing that catches people out — the palace closes for state occasions, sometimes with little notice, and a booked ticket does not override that.
• Under-eighteens go free, which makes it a cheap stop for families.
• The audio tour is included and worth the full hour; there is also a version for children.
• The building is accessible, with a lift to the main floor.
• It is on Dam Square, so you will pass it anyway. The entrance is on the left-hand side as you face the front.
• Dutch Museumkaart and ICOM cards are valid.

More paid and free sights are on our Amsterdam attractions page.

Frequently asked questions