Paris Itinerary: 3 Days, Hour by Hour With 2026 Prices

Three days is the length of trip that makes people nervous. It is long enough that you feel you ought to see everything, and short enough that you obviously cannot. I have watched friends spend all three days sprinting between monuments, ticking boxes, and coming home able to tell me the queue times at the Louvre but not one thing they ate.

So when people ask me for a Paris itinerary 3 days long, this is what I hand them: clock times, current 2026 prices, the métro lines you need and a deliberate amount of nothing. Day one takes the river and the islands. Day two takes the Eiffel Tower and the Left Bank. Day three takes Montmartre and the Marais, or Versailles if you would rather. It sits inside our wider France travel guide, and pairs with our longer list of things to do in Paris if you want more options than three days can hold.

Is 3 days enough in Paris?

No. It is also plenty. Both of those are true and the trick is deciding which one you are going to act on.

Three days gives you roughly 30 waking hours on the ground once you subtract sleep, and about 24 once you subtract the arrival scramble and the departure buffer. In that window you can comfortably do two major museums, three or four landmarks, two or three neighbourhoods on foot, and eat six good meals. That is a real trip. What it is not is a survey of Paris. You will leave without seeing the Catacombs, or the Musée Rodin, or the covered passages, or half the arrondissements, and the correct response to that is to come back rather than to walk faster. If Paris is one leg of something longer, our Europe itinerary planner and our 7-day Europe itinerary show where three days here fits.

The single decision that shapes everything else is whether you spend one of your three days at Versailles. Versailles is magnificent and it costs you a third of your trip: roughly nine hours door to door once you count the RER, the security queue and the gardens. My honest advice for a first visit of this length is to skip it, and I explain why further down. If you go anyway, day three of this plan swaps out cleanly.

Paris itinerary 3 days: the plan at a glance

Here is the shape of it before the detail. Walking distances are what you will cover if you follow the plan, not straight-line figures.

The ticket columns are full adult prices at the time of writing. If you are an EU or EEA resident under 26, a lot of that disappears, and I have flagged where in the price table below. If you are visiting from outside the EEA, one line item just went up, which brings me to the changes worth knowing about.

What changed in Paris for 2026

Paris has had an unusually eventful eighteen months for a city that mostly changes slowly. Six things matter to a three-day plan, and I would check every one of them again a week before you fly, because this is a moving picture.

One more, slightly further out: the CDG Express, a dedicated 20-minute train from Gare de l’Est to Charles de Gaulle, is scheduled to open in March 2027. It is not running for any trip you book this year.

Entry rules are the other thing to check before you book. If you are travelling from outside the EU, read our guide to ETIAS and Schengen entry requirements first, because the start date has moved more than once and the paperwork is not optional.

Start on the right day of the week

This is the single most useful thing in this article and almost nobody puts it up front. Paris museums close on fixed weekdays, and a three-day plan that lands the Louvre on a Tuesday is a broken plan. The Louvre closes Tuesdays. The Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Rodin, the Musée Picasso, the Musée Carnavalet and the Palace of Versailles all close Mondays.

Run the plan in the order below and here is how each possible start day works out.

If you land on a Wednesday you get both late nights, which effectively buys you an extra half day of museum time for free. That is worth shifting a flight by a day for, and it is the sort of thing that only shows up when you lay the week out like this.

Day 1: the islands, the Louvre and the river at dusk

Day one is the postcard day, and I have deliberately front-loaded the two things that reward an early start. You will walk about eight kilometres. Wear the shoes you have already broken in.

8.30am: breakfast, standing up

Find a boulangerie, not a hotel buffet. A croissant and an espresso at the counter is the correct Parisian breakfast and it costs about €3. Order your coffee au comptoir and you will pay around €1 for the espresso; sit at a table and it roughly doubles; sit on the terrace and it goes to €2.50 and up. That is not a scam, it is the published two-tier pricing every café in France uses, and once you know it the terrace price stops feeling like an insult and starts feeling like rent on a very good seat.

9am: Sainte-Chapelle

Get there for opening. Sainte-Chapelle is a small building and it fills fast, and the fifteen glass panels of the upper chapel are the single most astonishing thing on this itinerary. Adult entry is €22, free for EU residents under 26. The trick is that everyone piles into the gloomy lower chapel first and dawdles; go straight up the corner staircase and you get the upper chapel to yourself for about eight minutes before the room fills.

Go on a bright morning if the forecast lets you choose. In flat grey light the windows are still beautiful; in sun they are something else entirely. There is a combined ticket with the Conciergerie next door, which is worth it if you like medieval prisons and revolutionary history and is skippable if you do not. The Conciergerie on its own runs to around €11.50.

10.30am: Notre-Dame

Notre-Dame reopened after the fire and the interior is genuinely startling: the stone was cleaned as part of the restoration and it is now a pale honey colour that nobody alive had seen before. Entry is free. You do need a timed reservation, made on the cathedral’s own website, and you should ignore every third-party site offering to sell you one, because they are selling you something that costs nothing.

Allow 45 minutes inside. The tower climb is a separate ticket at €16 and a separate reservation, free for EU residents under 26, and I would leave it out of a three-day plan unless towers are your thing: it eats an hour and you get a better city view for free later in this itinerary.

11.45am: Île Saint-Louis and lunch

Cross the little footbridge behind the cathedral onto Île Saint-Louis, which is the quietest few hundred metres in central Paris and takes about twenty minutes to walk end to end. Have lunch here or on the Left Bank quays opposite. A formule lunch, meaning a fixed-price two or three course menu, typically runs €15 to €26 in a normal bistro, and it is by far the best value meal of the Parisian day. Dinner at the same restaurant will cost you half as much again for the same kitchen.

1.30pm: walk the quays to the Louvre

It is about twenty minutes along the water. You will pass the bouquinistes, the green boxes of secondhand books clamped to the parapet, whose sellers have traded along the river since the sixteenth century and have been fixed to the parapets since the nineteenth. The trade is listed as part of France’s national intangible cultural heritage. Most of them sell tourist prints now. A few still sell books.

2pm: the Louvre

Three hours, not more. The Louvre is not a museum you finish, it is a museum you visit, and the difference matters when you have three days.

Book a timed slot on the Louvre’s own site in advance. Reservation is mandatory even if you hold a Paris Museum Pass, which surprises people every single week, and slots for weekend and holiday afternoons can be gone two or three weeks out. Adult admission is €22 for EEA residents and €32 for everyone else, a two-tier structure introduced at the start of 2026. Under-18s go free worldwide, and EEA residents under 26 go free.

My route, if you want one: enter via the Porte des Lions or the Carrousel entrance rather than the pyramid, go straight to the Denon wing for the Italian paintings, look at the Mona Lisa for ninety seconds because you will want to be able to say you did, then walk away from it into the Grande Galerie where the Leonardos nobody queues for are hanging. Then Sully for the Venus de Milo and the Egyptian rooms, then Richelieu for the French sculpture courtyards, which are glass-roofed, enormous and almost always empty. Finish there, in the quiet.

On Wednesdays and Fridays the Louvre stays open until 9pm. If your day one is one of those, consider flipping this: do the islands in the afternoon and the Louvre from 6pm, when the crowd thins noticeably and the pyramid lights up as you leave.

5.15pm: Tuileries and the Palais Royal

Come out through the Tuileries and sit down. The green metal chairs around the ponds are free, they are meant to be dragged around, and an hour in one of them is not wasted time. Then cut north to the Palais Royal for the Colonnes de Buren, the striped stumps in the courtyard, and the arcades around the garden, which are one of the loveliest corners in the first arrondissement and about ninety seconds from the Louvre’s north wall.

7pm onwards: the river

There are two ways to end the day and I like both of them. Either take a Seine cruise, roughly an hour, with the big operators running from Pont de l’Alma and the Pont Neuf and prices commonly in the mid-teens per adult for the standard sightseeing trip. Or skip the boat, buy a bottle from a cave, and sit on the stone steps of the Pont Neuf or the quays below Île Saint-Louis with everyone else. Both are correct. The boat is better if it is your first time and you want the orientation; the steps are better if you want the evening to feel like yours.

Dinner in the Latin Quarter or the 5th, away from the Boulevard Saint-Michel tourist strip. Rue Mouffetard and the streets around Place de la Contrescarpe are lively without being a trap. Budget €20 to €35 a head for a proper bistro dinner, which is roughly the western European city average in our Europe on a budget breakdown, and remember that service is included by law in the price you see, so a tip is a gesture and not an obligation.

Day 2: the Eiffel Tower, the Orsay and the Left Bank

Day two is the one people get wrong most often, usually by trying to bolt the Arc de Triomphe onto the end of it and ending up on the métro at 8pm with sore feet. Keep it on the Left Bank and the river and it flows beautifully. About nine kilometres on foot.

Book the Eiffel Tower before you book anything else

This is the one ticket that will wreck your day if you leave it. Summit slots go on sale roughly 60 days out, released at midnight Paris time, and the good morning slots in summer disappear the same week. Turn up without a ticket in July at 11am and you are looking at 60 to 90 minutes in the queue for the privilege of paying full price.

A couple of caveats. There is no free-under-26 rule here; the tower is a private concession, not a national museum, so the EU student discount you get at the Louvre does not apply. And from 29 September 2026 the stairs tickets, which you could historically buy on the spot, require advance reservation too. Prices rose in the last year or so, so the figures above are the ones to budget from.

9am: up the tower

First slot of the day. Arrive at opening and you are usually through in under half an hour even in summer. My preference is the second floor by lift: you are at roughly the height where Paris still reads as a city rather than a map, you can pick out the Sacré-Cœur and the Panthéon and the dark green wedge of the Bois de Boulogne, and there is no second queue for the summit lift.

Allow an hour and a half on the tower and in the gardens underneath. Then walk out to the far end of the Champ de Mars and look back, which is the photograph you actually want and one of the shots that puts Paris near the top of our list of the most beautiful places in Europe, and cross the river to the Trocadéro terrace if you want the other one.

11.15am: Invalides and Pont Alexandre III

Walk east along the Left Bank. You will hit the gold dome of Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried inside six nested coffins like a very grim Russian doll, and then the Pont Alexandre III, which is the most ridiculous bridge in Europe and I mean that as praise. Gilt nymphs, art nouveau lamps, cherubs on every available surface. It is a ten-minute walk from Invalides and it takes most people twenty because they keep stopping.

If you love sculpture, the Musée Rodin is right here and it is the most humane museum in Paris: a small hôtel particulier with a rose garden full of bronzes, and the Thinker sitting outside in it. Around €14 including the garden, free for under-18s worldwide and for EU residents aged 18 to 25. It closes on Mondays. An hour is enough and it is the single best hour-long museum in the city.

12.30pm: lunch in the 7th

Rue Cler is the obvious market street and it is pleasant if slightly polished. The streets just south of it are better value. This is one of the few areas of central Paris where I would actively avoid anything with a picture menu, because the Eiffel Tower catchment has done what Eiffel Tower catchments do.

2pm: Musée d’Orsay

If you only do one museum properly in three days, some people would argue it should be this one rather than the Louvre, and on a short trip they have a point. The Orsay is a converted Beaux-Arts railway station, it is walkable end to end in two hours, and the fifth-floor impressionist galleries are the best-hung rooms of paintings in Europe. They are a large part of why Paris sits so high in our ranking of the best city breaks in Europe.

Adult admission is around €16, free for under-18s and for EU and EEA residents aged 18 to 25. It closes Mondays. On Thursdays it stays open until 9.45pm with a reduced ticket, commonly quoted at €12, for entry after 6pm, and a Thursday evening at the Orsay is one of the quietest premium experiences in Paris. There is a combined Orsay and Orangerie ticket at around €20, valid over several days, which is good value if you want the Monet water lilies as well.

Go up to the fifth floor first, while you have energy, and work down. Everybody does the ground floor first and runs out of attention two rooms into the Van Goghs. Stand behind the great clock face and look out through it at the Louvre across the river, which is free, takes thirty seconds, and is the picture everyone posts.

4.30pm: Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Twelve minutes on foot from the Orsay. This is the Paris of the mid-century imagination: Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots facing each other across the boulevard, both extremely expensive, both worth doing once for a single coffee if the mythology appeals to you. Around the corner, Rue de Buci and the streets towards Odéon are livelier and cheaper.

The Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés itself is the oldest church in Paris and free to enter, and hardly anybody going past to the cafés goes in. Give it ten minutes.

5.30pm: Jardin du Luxembourg

End the day here. It is the best park in Paris and it is not close: gravel walks, the octagonal pond where children push wooden sailboats with sticks, which earns its own entry in our Europe with kids guide, chairs you can move, an orchard, a beekeeping school, and the Medici Fountain in its dark green tunnel of trees at the eastern edge, which is the most romantic five square metres in the city and is signposted so badly that most visitors never find it.

The park closes at dusk, and the whistles start about fifteen minutes before, so you will be moved along whether you like it or not.

Evening: dinner in the 6th, then the tower at 10pm

Eat in the 6th or the 5th. Then, if you have anything left, get to the Pont de Bir-Hakeim or the Trocadéro terrace before the hour. The Eiffel Tower sparkles for five minutes on the hour after dark, twenty thousand bulbs firing at random, and it is unapologetically silly and completely wonderful, and it is free, which after a day of €22 admissions feels like a gift.

Day 3A: Montmartre in the morning, the Marais in the afternoon

Two hills of a sort, at opposite ends of the Right Bank, and the contrast between them is the point. Montmartre is steep, touristed and still, in patches, a village. The Marais is flat, fashionable and the oldest continuously inhabited quarter of the city. Roughly seven kilometres on foot, most of it gentle apart from one stiff climb.

8.30am: Montmartre, early, on purpose

Montmartre by 10.30am is a coach party. Montmartre at half past eight is a neighbourhood where people are buying bread. This is the biggest single quality-of-experience decision in the whole three days and it costs you nothing but an alarm.

Get out at Abbesses, which has one of the two surviving original Guimard art nouveau métro entrances and one of the deepest platforms on the network. Take the lift unless you want 176 steps of spiral staircase before breakfast.

From there: Place des Abbesses for coffee, up Rue des Trois Frères, along Rue Lepic past the café from Amélie and the two surviving windmills, then east and up to the Sacré-Cœur from the back rather than the front. Coming up the steps at the front is the famous approach and it is also where every busker, bracelet-seller and photographer is standing. The back way brings you out beside the basilica with the whole city already spread underneath you.

The basilica is free. It sits on the highest natural point in Paris, so the view from the terrace out front is one of the two or three best in the city and costs nothing at all. There is a separate paid climb up the dome if you want to go higher.

10am: the back of the hill

Behind Sacré-Cœur is the bit most people miss because they walk down the front steps and leave. Place du Tertre, the square of portrait painters, is directly behind the basilica and is frankly a circus, but it takes four minutes to cross and on the far side you are into the good part: Rue Cortot, the Musée de Montmartre in the house where Renoir and Suzanne Valadon worked, the Clos Montmartre vineyard on the north slope which still produces around a thousand bottles a year, and Rue de l’Abreuvoir curving down past La Maison Rose.

Keep going down and you come out near the Moulin Rouge on Boulevard de Clichy, which is worth exactly one photograph. The surrounding stretch of Pigalle is seedier than the guidebook pictures suggest during the day and perfectly fine.

12pm: lunch, then across the city

Eat around Abbesses or on Rue des Martyrs, which runs south off the hill and is one of the best food streets in Paris: cheesemongers, a proper fishmonger, several bakeries with queues that tell you which ones matter.

Then cross to the Marais. It is a métro ride with one change, and door to door, including the walk to the station and the walk out the other end, you should budget 20 to 25 minutes rather than the eight minutes a route planner will promise you. Get out at Saint-Paul or Chemin Vert.

2pm: Place des Vosges and the Marais

Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris, finished in 1612, thirty-six matching red brick and stone pavilions around a garden with four fountains. Walk the arcade the whole way round. The Maison de Victor Hugo is in the south-east corner. Its permanent collection is normally free, but entry has been ticketed during temporary exhibitions, so check the museum’s own page before you count on it.

Then pick one museum, not two. Your options:

• Musée Picasso, in a seventeenth-century mansion, around €16, with the deepest single Picasso collection anywhere. Best if you want art.
• Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris, and the permanent collection is free with no booking needed. It closes Mondays, open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm. Best if you want to understand what you have been walking around for three days, and it is the best free museum in the city.

If you have any interest at all in how Paris became Paris, take the Carnavalet. It is free, it is excellent, and it has the actual shop signs, ballroom interiors and Proust’s bedroom.

4.15pm: eating and wandering the Marais

Rue des Rosiers is the historic Jewish street and the falafel queues on it are the most famous cheap lunch in Paris, though you have just eaten, so treat it as a snack. Note that the Rosiers businesses observe Shabbat, so a Saturday visit finds much of the street shut. The Marais is also inside one of the designated international tourist zones, which is why its shops open on Sundays when much of Paris does not, typically around 11am to 7pm.

Wander north into the upper Marais, the 3rd, around Rue de Bretagne and the Marché des Enfants Rouges, the oldest covered market in Paris and still a working one with a dozen food stalls in it.

5.30pm: finish at Bastille or on the Coulée verte

Finish one of two ways. Either walk down to Place de la Bastille, where the prison was, and have a drink in the 11th. Or pick up the Coulée verte René-Dumont at the Bastille end, a planted walkway on a disused railway viaduct running nearly five kilometres east, roof height, above the traffic. It was the first of its kind and the New York High Line is its descendant. Even twenty minutes of it is a good way to end three days of city.

Evening

The 11th around Rue Oberkampf and Rue Saint-Maur, or Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th, are where you go for the Paris that Parisians actually eat and drink in on a weeknight. Both are twenty minutes from the Marais and neither is expensive.

Day 3B: the Versailles alternative

If you are going to do Versailles, do it properly and give it the whole day. Doing it badly is worse than not doing it.

Timed entry is required and the 9am slot is the one to get. The Hall of Mirrors at 9.15am is a room; the Hall of Mirrors at noon is a corridor of people photographing each other. Do the château first, then get out into the estate, because the gardens, the Grand Canal and the Trianon are where Versailles becomes enjoyable rather than merely impressive. Marie-Antoinette’s hamlet, at the far end, is a fake rustic village with a working farm and it is much stranger and better than it sounds. Rent a bike or take the little train if you do not want to walk the four-odd kilometres out and back.

My honest position: on a first three-day trip, Versailles costs you Montmartre, the Marais, a whole evening and most of your legs. I would rather you spent that day in Paris and came back for Versailles on a longer trip, ideally the one where you also see the châteaux of the Loire Valley and the rest of the best places to visit in France. But if the palace is the thing you have wanted to see since you were twelve, go, and ignore me.

The whole three days, hour by hour

Most three-day plans are written in morning, afternoon and evening blocks. Here is this one against a clock instead, which is what you need if you are trying to work out whether it fits. Times are the start of each thing, not the end, and every one of them has slack in it.

Day one runs to 10 moves, day two to 9 and day three to 10, which is about as much as anyone should attempt in a day without it turning into a route march. If you are travelling with children or with anyone who tires, cut the optional lines first: the Conciergerie on day one, the Rodin on day two, and the museum on day three.

Getting around Paris with reduced mobility

This deserves a straight answer rather than a sentence buried at the bottom. The Paris métro is one of the least accessible major systems in western Europe. Most stations were built between 1900 and 1930 and have stairs at both ends and no lift, and retrofitting them is largely impractical. Line 14, the newest and fully automatic line, is the exception and is step-free throughout, and the RER stations are better than the métro ones. Buses are the practical alternative: the city bus fleet is low-floor with ramps and it covers the same ground more slowly and far more comfortably.

Among the sights on this itinerary, the big national museums have made real progress and the Louvre, the Orsay and Versailles all have step-free routes, lifts and wheelchair loan, usually with free or reduced admission for a companion. The Eiffel Tower lifts reach the second floor but not the summit. Sainte-Chapelle’s upper chapel is normally reached by a tight spiral staircase, though a lift through the adjacent Palais de Justice can be arranged on weekdays if you contact the monument in advance. Montmartre is a hill with cobbles and steps and there is a funicular, but the back streets are not negotiable in a chair. Notre-Dame’s ground floor is accessible; the towers are not. Check each site’s own accessibility page before you build the day, because the details change with building works.

Every price you will pay, in one table

These are adult rates checked in August 2026. Paris revises museum prices more often than it used to, so treat them as accurate to within a euro or two and check the official site for anything you are booking. Where I could not find a figure I have said so rather than guessed, because a made-up number in a table like this is worse than a gap.

The under-26 rule deserves a paragraph of its own because it is worth serious money and it is not what most people assume. The national museums and monuments, meaning the Louvre, the Orsay, Sainte-Chapelle, the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon, Versailles and the rest of that family, are free to under-18s from anywhere in the world and free to EU or EEA residents aged 18 to 25 on production of ID. It is the single biggest saving available to young travellers anywhere on the continent, and our backpacking Europe guide lists the other countries that run the same scheme. The word is residents, not citizens, so a non-EU student with a French residence permit qualifies and an EU citizen living in Australia does not. And the Eiffel Tower is outside the scheme entirely, because it is run as a concession rather than as a national monument. A family of two adults and two 16-year-olds saves well over €100 across this itinerary without doing anything except carrying passports.

Is the Paris Museum Pass worth it for 3 days?

Usually not. I want to show you the arithmetic rather than just assert it, because this is one of the most-recommended purchases in Paris and on a three-day trip it very often loses.

Now price the itinerary above against it. Pass-eligible admissions on this plan are Sainte-Chapelle, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. The Eiffel Tower is not included in the pass, and neither is anything free like Notre-Dame or the Carnavalet.

So the pass pays off if and only if you are doing four or more paid national sites inside 48 hours, which is a punishing way to spend a short trip. There is one more catch: holding the pass does not get you into the Louvre without a reservation. You still have to book a timed slot on the Louvre’s own site, and people discover this at the door with some regularity.

It does buy two things the arithmetic misses. It lets you walk into a museum on a whim for twenty minutes without feeling you have to extract €16 of value, which changes how you use the city. And it can save queueing at the ticket desk, though not at security. If you are under 26 and EEA-resident, ignore all of this: almost everything on the pass is already free to you.

Paris will never be a cheap city, but it is not the most expensive one in Europe either. Our guide to the cheapest places to travel in Europe shows what the same three days would cost you elsewhere.

Getting around: métro fares and passes for 2026

Paris rebuilt its fare system at the start of 2026 and a lot of the advice online still describes the old one. The zone-based carnet you may remember is being retired, paper tickets are disappearing from buses through 2026, and the old “ticket t+” has been replaced by a flat metro, train and RER fare.

For a standard three-day trip, load a Navigo Easy card and pay per ride. Follow this itinerary and you will take perhaps six or eight métro journeys in total, because it is built around walking, which comes to roughly €15 to €20 a person for the whole trip. That is less than a single day of Paris Visite. The Navigo Découverte weekly only makes sense if your three days happen to fall inside one Monday-to-Sunday week, since it expires on the Sunday night regardless of when you bought it.

A few practical things about the métro. It runs until roughly 1am on weeknights and about an hour later on Friday and Saturday nights. Trains come every two to four minutes at peak, so if one is packed just wait for the next. Lines are numbered and colour-coded, and you navigate by the name of the terminus in the direction you are going, which is the one thing that trips up first-timers. The same logic runs most of the continent’s metro systems, and our guide to getting around Europe covers the rest of them. Line 1 is the tourist spine, running the length of the Right Bank from La Défense past the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Élysées, the Louvre, the Marais and Bastille. Line 14 is fully automatic, the newest and the fastest, and it now runs all the way to Orly airport.

Pickpocketing on the métro is real and unglamorous. It concentrates on Line 1, the RER B from the airport, and the station approaches to Sacré-Cœur. Keep your phone out of your back pocket and be alert at the moment the doors are closing, which is when the classic grab happens. Nothing else about the system requires vigilance.

Airport transfers, priced and timed

Both of the cheap airport buses that a generation of guidebooks recommended have been withdrawn. Roissybus, from Charles de Gaulle to Opéra, ran for the last time at the end of February 2026. Orlybus, from Orly to Denfert-Rochereau, stopped in March 2025 when the métro line 14 extension made it redundant.

The flat taxi fares are set by regulation and apply regardless of traffic, which makes a taxi much better value than it looks for two or more people arriving at Charles de Gaulle with luggage. Two people to the Right Bank works out at €28 each against €14 each on the RER, for a door-to-door ride with no stairs. Take it from the official rank; ignore anyone who approaches you in the terminal.

Looking further ahead, the CDG Express is scheduled to open in March 2027 and will run from Gare de l’Est to Charles de Gaulle in twenty minutes with a train every quarter of an hour. It is not an option for a trip this year.

If you are arriving by rail rather than air, note that Paris has six main-line stations and they are not interchangeable. Eurostar and trains from northern Europe use Gare du Nord. Gare de Lyon serves the south of France, Switzerland and Italy. Gare de l’Est serves eastern France, Germany and Luxembourg. Montparnasse serves Brittany and the south-west, including Bordeaux. Our Europe train itinerary and our roundup of the best travel routes in Europe show which connections are worth building a trip around.

Where to stay for three days

On a trip this short, the single biggest favour you can do yourself is to stay somewhere you can walk out of. A twenty-minute commute, taken twice a day for three days, costs you two full hours of Paris. That argues for the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th or 7th if the budget stretches, and for the 9th, 10th, 11th or 3rd if it does not, all of which are central enough to walk home from dinner. The same principle applies everywhere, and our where to stay in Europe guide sets it out city by city.

Rough 2026 nightly averages across the city run to about €130 for a two-star, €180 for a three-star, €274 for a four-star and €685 for a five-star. Staying in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 15th or the outer 19th and 20th typically knocks 25 to 40 per cent off the equivalent room in the 1st, 6th, 7th or 8th, which on a three-night stay is real money for a fifteen-minute métro ride.

The tourist tax you pay at checkout

Paris charges a taxe de séjour per person per night on top of the room rate, and a regional surcharge roughly triples the base municipal figure, which is why the numbers look higher than in other French cities. Under-18s are exempt.

For a couple in a four-star for three nights that is €50.70 added at the desk. Not enormous, but it is the sort of thing that sours the last five minutes of a good trip if nobody warned you.

What three days in Paris actually costs

Per person, three days and three nights, sharing a double room, based on the prices in this article. The mid-range and comfortable columns assume you follow the itinerary above and pay non-EEA adult rates. The shoestring column assumes a deliberately museum-light version of it, leaning on the free sights and climbing the Eiffel Tower by stairs. Tourist tax sits on top.

The shoestring column is not a fantasy. It assumes a two-star or a hostel bed, the slow airport bus, bakery breakfasts, a formule lunch, a cheap dinner, and leaning on the enormous amount of Paris that is free: Notre-Dame, the Carnavalet, Sacré-Cœur, every park, every church, the Galeries Lafayette rooftop, the Seine after dark. If you are an EEA resident under 26 the sights line drops to about €15 in every column, because everything except the Eiffel Tower is free to you.

What to book, and how far ahead

Buy everything from the official sites listed above. The resale sites that rank alongside them in search results sell the same tickets with a markup of anything from twenty to eighty per cent, and for Notre-Dame they are selling you a free reservation.

When to come for three days

Paris is a year-round city and the weather is rarely the deciding factor: it averages around 4.5°C in January and 20.5°C in July, so nothing is extreme. Rainfall is spread thinly across the year, about 746mm over roughly 110 rain days, with December the wettest month at around 77mm and September the driest at around 52mm. What varies is the crowds and the daylight.

If you can choose, come in September or in the first half of October. May is the other good answer. Whatever month you land on, our Europe packing list covers what earns its place in the bag. If you are coming in summer, build the itinerary above around early starts and let the afternoons be slow, because the heat has become a planning factor: in July 2026 several major sights, the Louvre and Versailles among them, ran reduced hours or closed early for a few days during a heatwave.

One August-specific warning. A large number of independent restaurants close for fermeture annuelle, concentrated roughly between the 3rd and the 23rd of August. Plenty stay open, particularly in the tourist-heavy arrondissements, but the small neighbourhood place you bookmarked in April may well have a handwritten note on the shutter. Check before you walk across the city for it.

December is the other special case, and a good one. Paris does the lights and the shop windows better than almost anywhere, and it features in both our guide to Christmas markets in Europe and our roundup of the best places to visit in Europe in winter.

Swap it to suit yourself

The three days above are the version I would give a first-time visitor who wants the classics done well. If that is not you, here is what to take out and what to put in.

Eating in Paris without wasting a meal

You get roughly eight eating opportunities in three days. Waste two of them and you have lost a quarter of the pleasure of the trip, so this is worth a little thought.

Four rules that will improve your eating more than any restaurant list. Eat your big meal at lunch, because the formule is roughly half the price of the same food at dinner. Avoid any restaurant with photographs of the food outside, a menu in six languages, or a man on the pavement inviting you in. Walk two streets away from whatever monument you have just visited before you even start looking. And accept that service and tax are included by law in the price on the menu, so tipping is a small gesture of a euro or two on a good meal and nothing more; nobody is calculating a percentage.

If you want to go deeper on what to order and why, our guide to European food covers the French regional dishes worth seeking out.

Mistakes I see people make on a three-day Paris trip

• Booking the Eiffel Tower last. It is the one ticket with a real supply constraint. Book it first and build the days around the slot you get.
• Arriving at the Louvre on a Tuesday. Or the Orsay on a Monday. See the day-of-week table above; it is the cheapest planning win available.
• Buying the Museum Pass reflexively. On a three-day trip it usually loses money, and it does not exempt you from the Louvre’s reservation.
• Trying to do Versailles as a half day. It is not a half day. It is eight to nine hours or it is a bad experience.
• Crossing the city four times a day. Paris is small and dense, and the right way to see it in three days is to work one area at a time on foot. If your plan has you on the métro six times before lunch, it is the wrong plan.
• Eating at the first place with a free table near a monument. Two streets is all it takes.
• Planning around the airport buses. Roissybus and Orlybus have both been withdrawn. It is the RER, the 350 or 351, the métro line 14 for Orly, or a taxi.
• Underestimating the walking. This itinerary is around 24 kilometres over three days. Bring the shoes you already trust and not the new ones.
• Standing in the Mona Lisa scrum for forty minutes. It is a small painting behind glass at the end of a very long room, and there are three other Leonardos in the same museum with nobody in front of them.
• Not sitting down. An hour in the Tuileries or the Luxembourg is not a gap in your itinerary. It is quite a lot of the point.

If you have more than three days

Everything above compresses well and expands better. A fourth day buys you Versailles without losing Montmartre. A fifth buys you the Catacombs, the Rodin, the covered passages of the 2nd and an afternoon doing nothing at all, which on a five-day trip stops being a luxury and starts being the reason it works.

Beyond that, Paris is one of the easiest cities in Europe to build a longer trip around. It is high on our list of the best cities to visit in Europe and our broader guide to the best places to visit in Europe, and it is the obvious first stop on a western Europe itinerary. If this is your first time on the continent, our list of the best places for first-time visitors and our Europe bucket list are the places to start, and our step-by-step guide to how to plan a trip to Europe handles the logistics. For the other great three-day European city, see our guide to things to do in Rome.

Final thoughts

The version of this trip that people remember is never the one with the most sights in it. It is the one where they sat in the Luxembourg for an hour on the second afternoon, or ended up in a café in the 11th at eleven at night, or came round a corner in Montmartre before the crowds arrived and found a man arranging peaches.

Three days gives you enough room for that if you plan the fixed points properly and leave the rest loose. Book the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, check which day of the week you are landing on, walk one area at a time, eat your big meal at lunch, and let the evenings do what they want. Paris will handle the rest.

And then come back. Everybody does.

About the author

Hannah Brooks has spent fifteen years travelling, living and writing across Europe, from the Arctic tip of Norway to the south of Sicily. She has planned hundreds of European itineraries for readers and is Senior Europe Editor at EuropeanTourism.org.

Photo credits

All images are used under Creative Commons or public domain licences via Wikimedia Commons.

• Paris itinerary 3 days: the Eiffel Tower seen looking up from the riverside walk · Photo: Wichien W (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
• The glass pyramid lit at night in the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris · Photo: cocoparisienne (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
• The rose window and stained glass of the upper chapel at Sainte-Chapelle in Paris · Photo: Gerda Arendt (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
• The west facade and towers of Notre-Dame de Paris seen from the quays · Photo: Sam valadi / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• A sightseeing boat passing along the Seine in central Paris at dusk · Photo: bigup21 / CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• A fishmonger’s display of shellfish and prawns on Rue Mouffetard in the Latin Quarter, Paris · Photo: ctj71081 / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• The Eiffel Tower in Paris seen from the Champ de Mars · Photo: Pierre Blaché from Paris, France (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
• The bronze and gilt cartouche on the Pont Alexandre III above the Seine in Paris · Photo: Jebulon (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
• The vaulted nave and great clock of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris · Photo: Sandor Laza / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• The terrace of the Cafe de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, Paris · Café de Flore terrace, Paris · Photo: Alexemanuel / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
• Children sailing toy boats on the pond at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris · Photo: Guilhem Vellut from Paris, France / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• The Sacre-Coeur basilica above the Montmartre district of Paris · Photo: Terragio67 / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• The Art Nouveau entrance of the Abbesses Metro station in Montmartre, Paris · Photo: DIMSFIKAS / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• The stone arcades running around the Place des Vosges in the Marais, Paris · Photo: GFreihalter / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Gilded cherubs and painted ceiling detail inside the Palace of Versailles · Photo: Jebulon (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
• The Arc de Triomphe on Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris on a clear day · Photo: Alexandre Prevot / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Walls of stacked bones and skulls in the ossuary of the Catacombs of Paris · Photo: Diego Delso / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Chandeliers and marble balconies in the grand foyer of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris · Photo: Gerda Arendt (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
• The Art Nouveau stained-glass dome above the shop floor of Galeries Lafayette in Paris · Photo: MrsEllacott / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• A display of French cheeses at a market in France · Photo: Elekes Andor / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons