Taj Mahal closing time, opening hours and the closed day

Ask a handful of websites for the Taj Mahal closing time and you will get a handful of clock hours, all of them wrong for part of the year. The reason is that the monument does not run on the clock. The Uttar Pradesh tourism department says it opens 30 minutes before sunrise and closes 30 minutes before sunset on normal operating days, and Incredible India states the same rule.^1,7 The closing hour moves through the seasons exactly as sunset does.

The ticket windows follow the sun as well, but they stop earlier than the gate. The department says the windows at the east and west gates open one hour before sunrise and close 45 minutes before sunset.³ That gap matters if you plan to buy at the gate: the grounds may stay open for another quarter of an hour, but nobody is selling tickets any more. The official pages do not name a separate last-entry hour, so treat the closing of the windows as your cut-off.

Use the sun tool above to turn the rule into a clock time. Pick the month, read sunset, subtract 30 minutes for the grounds and 45 minutes for the windows, and write both numbers on the back of your ticket.^1,3 That is all the arithmetic there is to Taj Mahal visit timing, and it is far more reliable than a figure copied from a blog that was true in a different month. For an evening visit, add a margin for the walk in from the parking area.

The closure applies to the Taj Mahal, not to the city. The tourism department says all other monuments and tourist attractions in Agra are open throughout the week from sunrise to sunset.¹⁰ That includes Agra Fort, where the balconies of the pavilions give views of the Yamuna River and the Taj Mahal, which makes it a natural substitute for a Friday sightseeing day.¹² Allow a full morning for it, since the fort is large and its walls are worth walking.

Entry fees reflect the day too. The department's fee table has a separate Friday column, and Agra Fort costs a foreign visitor Rs 650 on weekdays and Rs 600 on Fridays, against Rs 50 and Rs 40 for an Indian visitor.⁹ The same table shows the Taj Mahal as closed in its Friday column, so there is no Friday fee to find. The tickets page has the full table; the point here is that Friday is a normal day for most of the city.

For a view of the Taj itself, there is the river. The Agra Development Authority runs a viewpoint near Mehtab Bagh, open from sunrise to 12.00 midnight every day, and the tourism department says the Taj can be seen from it on Fridays and full moon nights.¹¹ Its tickets run from Rs 50 to Rs 500, depending on the visitor and the hour.¹³ A Friday in Agra can therefore still include the monument, seen from across the water, with the interior kept for a different morning.

There is a second set of hours that most visitors never see on a first trip. Night viewing is available on five days a month: the full moon night, two nights before and two nights after.⁵ It runs from 20:00 to 23:59 in 8 batches of at most 50 people, each lasting half an hour, and visitors report half an hour before their slot at Shilpgram for security checks.⁶ It is a different experience from the daytime visit, quieter and slower, and it needs planning from the day you book your flights.

Tickets for those slots are booked ahead, not at the gate. The tourism department says night viewing tickets can be booked seven days before the viewing date on the Archaeological Survey of India payment site, and gives the charges as Rs 510 for a domestic tourist and Rs 750 per person for a foreigner.^19,20 Every visitor must carry an ID, and the department says the list of prohibited items, together with mobile phones, applies at night too.^21,22

The slots are few: the department says at most 400 tourists are allowed for night viewing, divided into 8 batches of 50.²³ That makes the night visit the hardest ticket at the Taj, and a poor plan for a last-minute trip. Our full moon page covers the dates, the booking and what you see. For this page the takeaway is simple: the day hours and the night hours are separate systems, and a Friday does not change the night slots on a moon night.