Jaipur: Tickets, Hours and How to Visit
Jaipur packs six major ticketed sights, Amber Fort, Jaigarh Fort, the City Palace, Hawa Mahal, Jantar Mantar, and Nahargarh, into a core you can properly cover in 3 days, or comfortably stretch to 5. Buy the Composite Ticket first, it bundles five of them into one pass valid two days, and expect dual pricing at every gate: foreigners pay several times what Indian nationals pay, officially, not a scam.
Jaipur at a glance
| Sight | Foreigner price | Typical hours | Time needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amber Fort | 8am-5:30pm | 2-3 hours | |
| Jaigarh Fort | 9am-4:30pm | 45-60 min | |
| City Palace | 9:30am-5pm | 1.5-2 hours | |
| Hawa Mahal | 9am-4:30pm | 30-45 min | |
| Jantar Mantar | 9am-4:30pm | 1 hour with a guide | |
| Nahargarh Fort | 10am-sunset | 1-2 hours | |
| Albert Hall Museum | 9am-5pm, evening slots too | 45-60 min | |
| Composite Ticket | ~INR 1000-1100 typical (confirm, some sources list up to 1700) | valid 2 days | covers 5 of the above |
Book a guided Amber Fort and City Palace tour if you want the Sheesh Mahal’s mirror ceiling and Jantar Mantar’s stone instruments explained rather than just photographed, hours and prices above are approximate and worth confirming at the gate.
How to actually visit these sights
Do Amber Fort and Jaigarh Fort together, they share the same ridge north of the city, and go at opening (8am) to beat both the heat and the tour-bus crowds. Our full Jaipur guide covers where to stay and eat around each stop, along with the 3-day itinerary that puts all of this in order. Take the jeep up to Amber (roughly INR 500 round trip) or walk, skip the elephant ride, documented welfare investigations in 2018 and 2020 found real problems with animals working that steep path daily.
The City Palace, Hawa Mahal, and Jantar Mantar all sit inside the old walled Pink City within a short walk of each other, so pair them on a single old-city day rather than driving between them. Jantar Mantar specifically rewards a guide: without one, Jai Singh II’s 1734 stone instruments (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2010) just look like stone ramps and angles.
Save Nahargarh Fort for late afternoon, the sunset over the city from the ramparts is the actual reason to go. Albert Hall Museum, Rajasthan’s oldest museum in Ram Niwas Garden, works as a midday break between hilltop stops, check current hours on its official site since evening slots run separately from daytime ones.
Is the Composite Ticket worth buying? Yes, if you’re covering three or more of the bundled sights within two days. The 2026 foreigner price is inconsistent across sources, roughly INR 1000-1100 by most accounts but listed as high as INR 1700 elsewhere, so confirm the current figure at Jaleb Chowk (Amber Fort’s outer courtyard) before you buy, rather than budgeting off any single website.
What most first-time visitors miss
Jal Mahal, the palace sitting in Man Sagar Lake, can’t be entered at all, it’s a view-from-the-shore stop only, don’t plan time for a boat ride out to it. Patrika Gate at Jawahar Circle looks centuries old but was actually built in 2016 by a media company, free and photogenic but not a heritage monument on the same footing as the rest of this list. And the gem or handicraft “emporium” pitch, often from a driver or a new friend steering you to a “government-approved” shop for a commission, is the one scam here that actually costs money; dual pricing at the ticket counters, by contrast, is real, official, and not something to dispute at the gate.
Confirm every price on this page before you travel, Rajasthan revised monument fees on 1 January 2026 and sources still disagree on the exact post-revision numbers at several of these gates.