Charlottenburg Palace: Tickets, Which Ticket to Buy & the Gardens

The most expensive mistake at Berlin’s largest palace is made at the ticket desk, in about four seconds, by people who have not been told what they are buying. A single ticket at roughly €20 admits you to the Old Palace or the New Wing. Not both. The two buildings are joined, they look like one palace from the forecourt, and a steady stream of visitors discovers the distinction only when they are turned back at the second door. Everything else about charlottenburg palace berlin is straightforward; that one thing is not, and it is where this guide starts.

Below: which ticket covers what, whether the Charlottenburg+ combination pays back, what is actually in each building, why the gardens are the underrated half of the visit, how to get out here from Mitte, and when the palace is worth an afternoon and when it is not. Prices were checked in September 2026 and are the right order of magnitude — the Prussian palaces foundation revises its tariffs, so confirm on their own site before you travel.

The tickets, decoded

The recommendation is short: buy Charlottenburg+. If you are coming this far west you are giving the palace half a day, and the combination ticket costs little more than one building on its own while covering everything. Buying a single ticket to save a few euros and then discovering you cannot enter the other half is a false economy that a great many visitors make.

The exception: if you have ninety minutes and no more, buy the New Wing alone. The Golden Gallery and the White Hall are the rooms people photograph, and they are both in there.

What is in each building

The Old Palace

The original core, begun in 1695 for Sophie Charlotte, wife of the future Friedrich I, as a summer house called Lietzenburg. It grew steadily through the eighteenth century into the baroque block you see from the forecourt, with the domed tower and the gilded Fortuna weathervane on top.

Inside are the baroque state apartments: the Oak Gallery, the chapel, the royal bedchambers, the Prussian crown jewels. The room everyone stops in is the Porcelain Cabinet — a small chamber lined floor to ceiling with roughly 2,700 pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, arranged on brackets and mirrored panels so the whole room glitters. It is a monument to a specific eighteenth-century mania and it is genuinely startling the first time you walk into it.

The New Wing

Frederick the Great’s addition, built from 1740 by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, and architecturally the more ambitious half. Frederick lived here for a few years before losing interest in Charlottenburg and decamping to Sanssouci in Potsdam, which is why the wing feels slightly like an abandoned enthusiasm.

Two rooms carry it. The Golden Gallery is a 42-metre rococo ballroom in pale green with gilded stucco foliage running across every surface and mirrors doubling it all — an interior that does not so much decorate the walls as consume them. The White Hall is the calmer counterpart, a dining and throne room with a painted ceiling and tall arched windows. Beyond them are the winter chambers, an important collection of eighteenth-century French painting including Watteau, and the royal apartments of Friedrich Wilhelm II.

An important caveat: almost everything you are looking at is a reconstruction. The palace was very badly damaged by bombing in November 1943 and burned out, and the restoration ran from 1950s into the 1990s. It was nearly demolished — there was a serious postwar argument that the ruins of Prussian palaces should be cleared rather than rebuilt, and the Berliner Stadtschloss on Museum Island lost that argument and was blown up in 1950. Charlottenburg survived it. What that means in practice is that the fabric is honest reconstruction rather than survival, and the palace does not hide this.

The gardens, which are free and better than people expect

This is the part we would push hardest. The Schlossgarten behind the palace is open to anyone, costs nothing, and on a warm afternoon it is one of the more pleasant places in west Berlin.

It was laid out in 1697 as a French formal garden by a pupil of Le Nôtre — the parterre immediately behind the palace, with clipped cones, gravel walks and flower beds, is the surviving piece of that. In the early nineteenth century the outer sections were reworked in the English landscape manner, so as you walk away from the building the geometry dissolves into lawns, a lake, mature trees and a stretch of the Spree at the far end. The transition is the interesting part.

The three buildings in the grounds

All three are covered by Charlottenburg+ and all three are missed by most visitors.

• The Neuer Pavillon — Karl Friedrich Schinkel built it in 1825 as a summer house for Friedrich Wilhelm III, modelled on a villa the king had liked in Naples. It is small, restrained and completely unlike the palace, and it now holds Schinkel’s own paintings and works by Caspar David Friedrich. For anyone interested in German Romanticism it is the best thing on the site.
• The Belvedere — a teahouse at the far end of the garden by the Spree, now holding the Berlin porcelain collection: KPM, the royal manufactory. Pretty from outside, specialist inside.
• The Mausoleum — a small neoclassical temple in the trees holding the tombs of Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise, whose recumbent marble effigy by Christian Daniel Rauch is the reason to go in. Luise died at thirty-four and became a national figure in a way that is hard to overstate. It takes ten minutes and it is the quietest place on the estate.

How long it takes, and how to sequence it

Allow two hours for the interiors on a Charlottenburg+ ticket — an hour in each building, roughly — and another hour for the gardens and the pavilions. Three hours is a comfortable half-day, and with the journey out from Mitte it will consume an afternoon.

The order we would walk it:

• Old Palace first, because it is the chronological beginning and because the Porcelain Cabinet is better appreciated before your eye has been saturated by the Golden Gallery.
• New Wing second. The rococo lands harder as a contrast.
• Out into the parterre, then the Neuer Pavillon, which is close to the palace.
• Walk to the far end of the garden for the Belvedere and the river, then back via the Mausoleum in the trees.
• Coffee in the Kleine Orangerie by the palace, or walk five minutes to Schloßstraße.

Opening hours and timing

The palace runs summer and winter schedules: roughly 10:00–17:30 from April to October and 10:00–16:30 from November to March, with last admission an hour or so before closing. Check the current times before you set out, particularly in winter, when a 16:30 close and a 16:00 arrival is not enough for two buildings.

The gardens keep longer hours than the buildings and are open when the palace is not, which makes an early-evening walk out here in summer a reasonable idea on its own.

Best time to visit

• Late spring and early summer — the parterre is planted and the garden is at its best. Weekday mornings are quiet.
• Autumn — the English section of the garden turns, and the palace is much less busy than in August. See Berlin in autumn.
• December — the Christmas market in the palace forecourt is one of Berlin’s prettiest, with the floodlit baroque facade behind the stalls. It is also very busy. Our Christmas markets guide ranks it.
• Avoid summer weekends after 12:00, when coach groups and the timed-entry queue coincide.

Booking

Timed tickets are advisable in high season and at weekends, and largely unnecessary on a Tuesday in February. Buy from the foundation’s own site rather than a reseller. The palace is closed on Mondays, which catches out anyone building a Monday itinerary out of museums — a problem across Berlin, and covered in our attractions and tickets guide.

Getting there

Charlottenburg is out west, and this is the one thing that puts people off. It should not.

• U7 to Richard-Wagner-Platz, then about eight minutes on foot. The simplest route from most of the city.
• U2 to Sophie-Charlotte-Platz, then roughly twelve minutes’ walk up Schloßstraße, which is the nicer approach — you come at the palace down its own axis.
• S-Bahn to Westend, then the M45 bus.
• Buses M45 and 309 stop close to the forecourt.

From Alexanderplatz allow about forty minutes door to door. It is comfortably inside the AB fare zone, so a normal day ticket covers it — see the BVG tickets guide and the U-Bahn and S-Bahn guide.

Accessibility

Mixed, and this is the palace’s genuine weak point. The gardens are flat and largely accessible. The interiors are eighteenth-century buildings with staircases and thresholds; there is lift access to parts of both wings but not everywhere, and some state rooms are not reachable by wheelchair. Contact the foundation ahead if this matters, and see our accessible transport guide for getting out here.

What else is around it

Coming this far west opens up a district most visitors never see, and it is worth building the afternoon out.

• The Berggruen Museum and the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, in the two pavilions directly opposite the palace forecourt — Picasso, Klee, Giacometti in one and Surrealism in the other. Both are excellent and both are quiet.
• Schloßstraße, the boulevard running south from the palace: cafés, an antiques trade, and a completely different Berlin from Mitte.
• Kurfürstendamm and KaDeWe, fifteen minutes east — the west’s shopping spine. See our Kurfürstendamm guide.
• The Olympiastadion, further west on the U2 — €10 self-guided, €14 for the English guided tour that reaches the underground warm-up halls.
• Charlottenburg’s hotels are a serious alternative to staying in Mitte: quieter, often better value, and well connected. Our Charlottenburg hotels guide covers the options.

Is it worth it?

An honest answer, because the palace divides visitors more than its reputation suggests.

Yes if you like eighteenth-century interiors, you have three or more days in Berlin, you want a day that is not about the twentieth century, or you are travelling with someone who has had enough of the Wall. The Golden Gallery is a genuinely great room and the gardens are a genuinely good park.

No if you have two days and have not yet seen Museum Island, the Reichstag or the memorials. Charlottenburg is a good palace; it is not a great one by European standards, and if you have seen Versailles, Schönbrunn or Sanssouci it will not rearrange your ideas. And if you are going to Potsdam anyway, Sanssouci is the better palace day out of Berlin and it is not close.

The middle position, which we would actually recommend to most people: go for the gardens, which cost nothing, and buy the New Wing ticket on the day if you like what you see from outside. That is a good afternoon for about €11.

The women who built it, and the woman who is buried in it

Charlottenburg is unusual among Prussian palaces in that its story is largely female, and the audio guide is better on this than most palace commentaries.

Sophie Charlotte

The palace exists because of her. Sophie Charlotte of Hanover married the future Friedrich I and was given the land in 1695 for a summer retreat out in the countryside — Lietzenburg, well beyond the edge of Berlin as it then was. She was seriously intellectual by the standards of any court: she corresponded with Leibniz, who visited her here repeatedly, and the palace under her became a centre of philosophical conversation rather than of protocol. She died in 1705 at thirty-six, and her husband renamed the place Charlottenburg after her. The town that grew up around it took the name too, which is why the district is called what it is.

Queen Luise

A century later, Luise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of Friedrich Wilhelm III, became the most popular figure in Prussia — largely for her conduct during the Napoleonic occupation, when she met Napoleon at Tilsit and argued Prussia’s case directly to him. She died in 1810 at thirty-four and the country went into something close to a national cult of mourning. Schinkel’s mausoleum in the palace grounds was built for her, and Christian Daniel Rauch’s marble effigy of her lying asleep is one of the finest pieces of nineteenth-century sculpture in Germany. Her husband was placed beside her twenty-nine years later.

The Prussian palaces beyond this one

Charlottenburg is one of about thirty sites run by the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten across Berlin and Brandenburg. If you find you like this sort of thing, the foundation sells a multi-site card that covers all of them, which becomes good value fast if you are also doing Potsdam. Sanssouci, the Neues Palais, Schloss Cecilienhof and the Marmorpalais are all on it.

Eating and drinking on site and nearby

• The Kleine Orangerie, in the palace grounds — a café-restaurant in the small orangery with a terrace looking onto the garden. Convenient, pleasant, and priced as an on-site café is priced.
• Schloßstraße, running south from the forecourt, has a handful of proper cafés and bakeries within five minutes, and they are markedly better value.
• Klausenerplatz, the quiet residential quarter just east of the palace, is where the neighbourhood actually eats — small restaurants, a Kiez feel, no tourists. Ten minutes on foot and worth it.
• The Christmas market in December fills the forecourt with Glühwein stands under the floodlit baroque facade, which is the prettiest setting of any Berlin market.

For where to eat more widely in this part of the city, our Berlin food guide and the traditional German food guide both cover the west.

Practical notes

• Cloakroom. Large bags and rucksacks must be left; the cloakroom is free and usually takes a returnable coin.
• Photography is permitted without flash in most rooms. Some special exhibitions restrict it.
• Floor protectors. In some of the historic rooms you are given overshoes to protect the parquet. Wear them without complaint — the floors in the Golden Gallery are original in places.
• The audio guide is included, which is unusual, and it is genuinely good. Do not skip it to save fifteen minutes.
• Toilets are at the entrance and in the Kleine Orangerie; there are none in the garden proper, which is large.
• Timed entry applies in high season. Arriving without a slot on an August Saturday can mean an hour’s wait.
• Reduced rates apply for students, over-65s and the unemployed; under-18s are generally free. Bring the card. See our student discounts guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Charlottenburg Palace cost?

A single ticket to either the Old Palace or the New Wing runs around €10–€14; the Charlottenburg+ combination covering both buildings and the garden pavilions is around €20 or a little more. The gardens themselves are free. An audio guide is included in the ticket price. Prices were checked in September 2026 — confirm on the foundation’s own site.

Which Charlottenburg Palace ticket should I buy?

Charlottenburg+, in almost every case. A single ticket admits you to one building only, which surprises people at the door of the second, and the combination costs little more while adding the Neuer Pavillon, the Belvedere and the Mausoleum. Buy the New Wing alone only if you have ninety minutes — the Golden Gallery and the White Hall are both in there.

Are the Charlottenburg Palace gardens free?

Yes, entirely. The Schlossgarten is open to the public at no charge and keeps longer hours than the buildings. The formal parterre nearest the palace is the 1697 French layout; the outer sections were reworked as an English landscape park in the nineteenth century.

How long do you need at Charlottenburg Palace?

Two hours for both buildings, three with the gardens and the pavilions. Add roughly forty minutes each way from central Berlin, and it is a half-day.

Is Charlottenburg Palace open on Mondays?

No — the palace closes on Mondays, as do a great many Berlin museums. The gardens remain open.

How do I get to Charlottenburg Palace?

U7 to Richard-Wagner-Platz and walk eight minutes, or U2 to Sophie-Charlotte-Platz and walk twelve up Schloßstraße, which is the better approach. Buses M45 and 309 stop nearby. It is inside the AB fare zone.

Is Charlottenburg Palace worth visiting?

Yes on a longer trip, and particularly if you want a day away from twentieth-century Berlin. On a two-day trip it comes behind Museum Island, the Reichstag and the memorials. If you are also going to Potsdam, Sanssouci is the stronger palace day.

Was Charlottenburg Palace destroyed in the war?

Very largely. It was bombed in November 1943 and burned out, and there was a serious postwar argument about demolishing the ruins rather than rebuilding — an argument the Berliner Stadtschloss on Museum Island lost, and was blown up in 1950. Charlottenburg was restored over four decades, so most of what you see is reconstruction, and the palace is open about that.

The palace makes a far better day if you give the district around it the rest of the afternoon. Twenty minutes away are the bombed tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Kurfürstendamm, the bookshops and wine bars around Savignyplatz, and a long run of excellent Asian restaurants on Kantstraße. Our Charlottenburg guide joins them up.

Related Berlin Guides

• Berlin Attractions & Tickets
• Potsdam Day Trip from Berlin
• Hotels in Charlottenburg
• Berlin Museums Guide
• Berlin Christmas Markets
• Outdoor Activities in Berlin

Final Word

Charlottenburg is the palace Berlin nearly threw away. The city demolished the Hohenzollerns’ main residence on Museum Island in 1950 as a matter of ideology, and it took forty years of patient restoration for this one to come back from the same condition. Standing in the Golden Gallery, it is worth knowing that the room was a burnt shell inside living memory and that every gilded scroll on those walls is somebody’s careful reconstruction.

Buy the Charlottenburg+ ticket and take the audio guide. Do the Old Palace first and the New Wing second. Then go out of the back door into the parterre, walk until the straight lines give up and turn into lawn and trees, and find the small temple in the woods where Queen Luise lies in white marble. That last part costs nothing if you have the combination ticket and ten minutes, and it is the bit people remember.

Photo Credits

The Golden Gallery: 2023 Neuer Flügel, Goldene Galerie 1 by Bärwinkel,Klaus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The White Hall: 2023 Neuer Flügel, Speisesaal by Bärwinkel,Klaus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.