Tariff & Threshold Index Sohag · Est. 2017 · ISSN 2735-5193

Quarterly tracker · Sohag visitor-equity desk · Independent

What you actually pay, and what the museum actually opens, at twelve Egyptian institutions.

Tariff & Threshold Index documents the admission fees, opening hours, wheelchair accessibility, student-card acceptance and child-family pricing across the twelve largest publicly-accessible Egyptian museums and major archaeological sites. We are based in Sohag, publish quarterly, do not sell tickets ourselves, and have no commercial relationship with any museum or tour operator. The Index is read by travel-section editors, accessibility-advocacy organisations and the museums' own visitor-experience teams as the independent cross-reference against their internal records.

Cairo museum tariffs Accessibility audit

Museums tracked quarterly

4tiers

Access categories audited per site

Fee changes logged in 2025

The twelve institutions

From the Grand Egyptian Museum to the small site museums of Upper Egypt.

The Index tracks twelve institutions selected for their visitor volume, geographic coverage across Egypt, and the diversity of admission frameworks they operate. The list includes the major Cairo institutions (the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, the historic Cairo Museum at Tahrir, the Coptic Museum, the Islamic Art Museum), the Alexandria pair (the Greco-Roman Museum and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina museum collections), the Upper Egypt institutions (Luxor Museum, Mummification Museum, Nubian Museum at Aswan), and the regional site museums (Sohag Museum, Mallawi Museum at Minya, Imhotep Museum at Saqqara). We publish a one-page summary of each institution's current admission framework on the relevant period page, with the full quarterly tables in the subscriber bulletin.

Cairo · Giza

Grand Egyptian Museum

Tourist: EGP 1 200 · Resident: EGP 150 · Student: EGP 600

Wheelchair Lifts Audio guide Family ticket

Full Cairo tariff →

Luxor · East Bank

Luxor Museum

Tourist: EGP 350 · Resident: EGP 30 · Student: EGP 175

Wheelchair Lift (under refurb) Audio guide Family ticket

Full Luxor/Aswan tariff →

Aswan · Nubian

Nubian Museum

Tourist: EGP 200 · Resident: EGP 20 · Student: EGP 100

Wheelchair Lifts No audio guide Family ticket

Full Luxor/Aswan tariff →

Four access tiers per site

Tourist, resident, student, family. Plus the accessibility audit.

Every entry in the Index records four standard admission tiers — full tourist rate, Egyptian resident rate, student rate (with conditions on what student-card categories the museum accepts), and child/family rate (with the museum's own age-cutoff definitions). On top of the four tiers, we run an annual accessibility audit covering wheelchair access at entrance and within the galleries, lift availability, accessible toilets, audio-guide availability with hearing-assistance options, family-bathroom facilities, and the visitor-experience staff's specific training on accessibility support.

Tier 01 · Tourist

Standard international rate.

The full admission rate quoted on the museum's published tariff for international visitors. Typically the highest of the four tiers, ranging from EGP 100 at small site museums to EGP 1 200 at the Grand Egyptian Museum.

Tier 02 · Resident

Egyptian residents and Egyptian nationals abroad.

The discounted rate for residents and citizens, between five and twenty percent of the tourist rate. Documentation requirements vary; we record what each museum requires at the ticket desk.

Tier 03 · Student

Recognised student card holders.

The student-card discount. Typically half the relevant resident or tourist rate. We track which specific student-card categories each museum accepts — Egyptian university cards, ISIC, ESI, foreign-university cards.

Tier 04 · Child & Family

Children's and family-group pricing.

Children's individual rate and family-group discount where offered. Age cut-offs vary widely (under-6, under-12, under-16). We record each museum's own definition and the conditions for the family-group rate.

Why this index exists

Because museum admission information is fragmented and changes frequently.

Egyptian museum admission tariffs are set by the Supreme Council of Antiquities, by individual museum boards, and by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities under a layered framework that allows considerable institution-specific variation. The result, for the visitor planning a museum day, is that the admission rate quoted in a 2023 guidebook is unreliable; the rate published on the museum's own website is often months out of date; and the rate the visitor actually pays at the ticket window may differ from the published tariff by ten to thirty percent depending on documentation, day-of-week and group composition.

The Index addresses this by visiting every tracked museum at least quarterly and recording the tariff at the ticket window as well as on the museum's public-facing pricing channels. We also record the opening hours actually in force, with particular attention to Ramadan-period schedule changes, public-holiday closures, and the museums' periodic Monday-closure shifts. The accessibility audit runs once a year with a follow-up audit if a museum reports a structural change. The Index is sustained by reader subscriptions and by a research grant from the El-Minia Cultural Foundation; the funding structure is described on the about page.

Visitors at the Grand Egyptian Museum ticket lobby in Cairo

Reader questions, briefly

The questions travellers and accessibility readers ask first.

How often is the index updated?

The full tariff and opening-hours tables are updated quarterly — January, April, July and October. Critical mid-quarter changes (a sudden tariff increase, a museum's unannounced closure for refurbishment, a major Ramadan schedule shift) are published as supplementary bulletins between the quarterly updates. The Friday-by-Friday running notes go to subscribers in the monthly newsletter.

Do you sell museum tickets?

No. The Index is editorial only. We do not run a ticket-booking widget, do not partner with any ticket reseller and do not receive commission on any museum admission. Visitors buy their tickets at the museum's own ticket desk or through the official online channels where they exist. The Index records what those channels charge; the channels themselves are run by the museums.

How do you audit accessibility?

The annual accessibility audit follows a structured checklist developed in consultation with the Egyptian Disability Rights Association and the Cairo Accessible Tourism Centre. The checklist covers thirty-seven items across entrance, gallery navigation, toilets, audio-guide and hearing assistance, family bathrooms, and staff training. Each item is rated yes/no/partial. The audit is conducted in person by one of the Index editors plus a consultant audit partner (an accessibility-experienced visitor) who tests the wheelchair-access points during the audit visit.

Why no commercial sponsors?

Because the Index's value to the reader depends on its commercial independence from the museums and the ticket-resale market. Reader subscriptions cover approximately fifty-seven percent of annual costs; the El-Minia Cultural Foundation research grant covers thirty-one percent; the remainder is small consultancy work that the editors do separately. No museum, ticket reseller, tour operator or government department funds the Index.

One monthly bulletin. Twelve to twenty pages of tariff changes, audits and reader questions.

Subscribers receive the monthly bulletin on the first Friday of each month and the full quarterly tables a week before they appear on the public pages. Three tiers from eighteen euros a year.

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