Despite Shae and I visiting Washington D.C. a number of times in the past, we’d never been up 500 feet inside the Washington Monument. One of the main reasons for that is that it’s been closed quite a lot in recent years, but it reopened again in September 2019.
Before arriving in D.C., one of our readers (thanks Lynn!) suggested visiting the Washington Monument, but advised that we’d need tickets ahead of time. That was a couple of weeks before our arrival in the nation’s capital and it seemed like we were too late booking ahead of time. Tickets go on sale 90 days beforehand, so all our dates were booked up by the time we went to get tickets. Our only option was to get there first thing in the morning to get a couple of the limited number of walk-up tickets that are made available each day.
Or so we thought.
I thankfully discovered a way to get tickets without having to get up super early in the morning for walk-up tickets. I don’t normally go to bed until past 3am, so the thought of getting into D.C. from Chantilly, VA for 8:30am wasn’t high on my list of things I wanted to do in the capital!
It turns out there are four different ways you can get tickets, including one method that allows you to magically find thousands of tickets with just two clicks, even when it looks like tickets are fully sold out.
Intrigued? Read on to find out how to get tickets for the Washington Monument even if the date and/or time you want doesn’t seem to be available.
1) Book 3 Months Ahead Of Time
If you’re well-organized and know the dates you’ll be visiting Washington D.C. well in advance of your trip, your best option is to book your tickets online three months ahead of time.
You book your tickets at recreation.gov and it’s a very simple process. Simply select the tour type, how many guests, the date and time and complete your booking. Tickets to the Washington Monument are free, but it costs $1 per person to reserve your tickets online which is money well spent. Shae and I really enjoyed our visit there as it was far more interesting than I was expecting (here are 14 fun facts we learned), so you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to tour the inside.
I’m not entirely sure when each batch of tickets is loaded, so I don’t know if they load new dates each week or if it’s done on a daily or monthly basis. When taking a look on November 27, 2019, it was letting me view dates through to February 29, 2020 which is 94 days away.
2) Get Walk-Up Tickets On The Day
I’m sure there are many people who don’t have the luxury of planning a trip to Washington D.C. more than three months in advance. I’m also sure there are many people that simply aren’t aware that you need tickets ahead of time to visit the Washington Monument – we certainly didn’t know that until reading Lynn’s comment on one of our previous blog posts.
Thankfully all is not lost. Every morning at 8:30am, the National Park Service releases a batch of walk-up tickets. If you’re visiting during the summer or some other busy time of year (e.g. public holidays), the tickets apparently get snapped up extremely quickly, so you need to arrive before 8:30am to have a chance.
During quieter times of the year there’s better availability for walk-up tickets. We’d booked our tickets for 12pm on November 20, 2019 and while waiting to enter, a family came up to the entrance wanting to visit the monument. They were advised to head over to the ticket office, so it seemed like they still had tickets available even into the afternoon.
To get walk-up tickets, look for the stone building in the photo below which is on the opposite side of the monument to the Lincoln Memorial. It has a bookstore on the other side of the building where you can get your National Park passport stamped, then on this side there’s a window where you can get walk-up tickets.
3) Book Online At 10am The Day Before
A somewhat last minute option that’s slightly safer than relying on walk-up tickets being available on the day is to book tickets the day before at 10am. That’s when they make a batch of tickets available for the following day. It seems like you have to be quick on the draw though as fewer than 100 tickets are made available at 10am, with only a dozen tickets per time slot being available.
4) Book A Large Group (Even If You’re Not A Large Group!)
This is the option Shae and I used to book our tickets the week before our visit. When you look at the ticket options on recreation.gov, you’ll see there are two types of tour – a large group tour and a regular tour which is for individuals.
You can book up to 55 tickets for the large group tour, while individuals can book up to 6 tickets for the regular tour. Something worth noting with the large group tour is that although the maximum number of tickets is 55, there’s no minimum number of tickets. You could even book the very last available ticket on a tour if you’re going by yourself.
The Washington Monument ticketing site doesn’t highlight the fact that large group tours don’t have to have a minimum size, so I think a lot of people probably overlook this ticketing opportunity. I almost ignored the opportunity myself, so I’m glad I decided to test it out by booking two tickets for Shae and myself. Doing so meant we had guaranteed tickets for the date and time that we wanted.
The reason it’s worth being aware of this is because it opens up a lot more availability that otherwise appears to be sold out. For example, at the time of writing this post on November 27, 2019, it looks like there are no tickets available for the regular tour until January 6, 2020 and that date only has two tickets available. That means the Washington Monument is fully booked pretty much 6 weeks in advance.
Except it isn’t!
Change the tour type from the regular tour to the large group tour and voila! All of a sudden thousands of tickets become bookable, so you no longer have to wait 6 weeks. In fact, when doing a search while writing this post I can see almost 200 tickets still being available for December 2 which is just 5 days away.
If you leave it on that date and switch it back to the regular tour, it makes it look like there are no tickets other than the ones available at 10am the day before (the ’12 Not Yet Released’ options) and the walk-up tickets.
I’ll admit, I was a little nervous about booking large group tickets for just the two of us, but it was absolutely fine. The National Park Service allowed us to buy just the two tickets online and we had no problems whatsoever when showing up at midday for our tour.
Final Thoughts
If you’re wondering how to get tickets for the Washington Monument – especially when it’s sold out – I hope this has been helpful. I can’t guarantee that large group tickets will be available all throughout the summer, but I suspect you’ll still have a better chance going that route at the last minute than getting walk-up tickets.
Thank you so much for the awesome tip about the group tour option! What a great discovery you made. We had five people clicking at exactly 10 a.m. and the “not yet available” changed to “sold out” for ALL times in a matter of seconds (ONE SECOND). I was researching why this happens so fast and found your post. I still couldn’t get tix for next day, but two weeks out has plenty of group tour tix available. Thanks!!
Awesome, I’m so glad it helped 🙂
Thank you so much!! I was able to get tickets for this coming Wednesday. I was so bummed that they were sold out but I used the Large group reservation option. I have tickets!!!! Thank you!!!!
Awesome, I’m glad that this was helpful and that you managed to get tickets. Hope you have a great time!