Anne Frank House, Amsterdam: Get the Tickets Before You Get on the Plane

New tickets for the Anne Frank House are released every Tuesday at 10am Amsterdam time for entry six weeks later. During peak season, from March through October, they sell out within hours of release. This is the most important practical fact about visiting the museum: you cannot decide to go on a Thursday and show up on Friday. Plan the visit before you book the flights, or you will stand outside a canal house on Prinsengracht and read the building’s exterior from the pavement.

The tickets cost €16.50 for adults, €7 for children aged 10 to 17, €1 for under-10s. Photography inside is not permitted. The visit moves slowly through the original building at Prinsengracht 263-267, culminating in the Secret Annex, the hidden rear section where eight people spent 25 months in complete concealment between July 1942 and August 1944.

The History

Otto Frank moved his family into hiding in July 1942 after his daughter Margot received a call-up notice for a Nazi labour camp. The Annex was a set of rooms at the rear of the building above his Opekta spice company offices, accessible through a door concealed behind a hinged bookcase. Eight people lived there: Otto, his wife Edith, daughters Margot and Anne, Hermann van Pels and his wife Auguste, their son Peter, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer. Helpers including Miep Gies and Johannes Kleiman supplied food, books, and news from the outside world at considerable personal risk.

The group was betrayed in August 1944. All eight were arrested and deported. Only Otto Frank survived the camps. After liberation, Miep Gies gave him Anne’s diary, which she had retrieved from the Annex after the arrest. Otto Frank later recalled that he did not fully realise the extent of Anne’s inner life until he read it.

Visiting

The house moves you through the front building, where the helpers worked, and then into the Annex via the original bookcase doorway. The rooms are empty, as Otto Frank requested they remain: no furniture, no recreation of domesticity. The emptiness is precisely the point. The pencil lines on the wall marking the children’s heights as they grew during those 25 months are still there.

The final sections of the exhibition address the diary’s publication history and the ongoing relevance of the ideas in it. This part of the museum is thoughtfully done and worth slowing down for rather than rushing toward the exit.

Allow about 90 minutes. The guided tours offered are useful context, but the self-guided visit with the audio material works well enough.

The Jordaan

The museum sits in the Jordaan, a neighbourhood of narrow canals, independent boutiques, and brown cafes that is worth exploring before or after the visit. Winkel 43 on Noordermarkt serves what many Amsterdam regulars consider the best appeltaart in the city; the queue on Saturday mornings is its own kind of endorsement. Café ’t Smalle, a brown cafe on Egelantiersgracht dating to 1786, is the place for a beer or a jenever before walking back along the canal.

For a longer meal, Toscanini on Lindengracht is a longstanding Italian restaurant in a neighbourhood setting that has nothing to do with tourism; the pasta is made daily and the room fills with locals. Reservations recommended.

Where to Stay

The Pulitzer Amsterdam, a row of 25 connected canal houses west of the Anne Frank House, is the most characterful option in the neighbourhood and puts you within a five-minute walk of the museum. The Ambassade Hotel, similarly positioned on Herengracht, is smaller and slightly quieter. Both reflect the canal-house aesthetic without the inconveniences of actually sleeping in a 17th-century building.

Budget options cluster around the Jordaan perimeter; staying in the neighbourhood itself means easy access to the museum before the midday rush, which is genuinely worth something.

Practical Notes

Amsterdam is a cycling city; a rental bicycle is the fastest way to get between sights. The Netherlands uses card payments almost universally, but carry some euros for smaller transactions at markets and street stalls. English is spoken everywhere in the tourist areas without exception.

If you book at the six-week mark and still cannot get in, check the official website on the morning of your preferred date: a small number of timed tickets are sometimes released for same-day visits. This is not a reliable strategy, but it occasionally works.