An open night at the museum is an appealing promise: the usual rules are suspended, the doors stay open. In terms of cultural policy, though, I am less interested in the exception than in the following Tuesday. Who can come then? Who can afford it? And who can feel that they are welcome as a matter of course, without first having to explain their financial circumstances?
My argument is simple: publicly funded museums should offer reliable, free access. Particularly when budgets are tight, that is no easy promise to make. It is a question of political priorities. Not every temporary exhibition has to be free at all times. But public funding must not stop at preserving the collection while access depends on the ability to pay.
Billions do not amount to an invitation
The financial situation has deteriorated dramatically. Germany’s local authorities ended 2025 with a record deficit of €31.9 billion; in the first half of 2026, the deficit again reached €20.1 billion. Meanwhile, the federal budget for culture and media rose to €2.57 billion for 2026. Anyone discussing free museum admission therefore needs to look closely: the budgetary situation varies depending on the funding body. Good intentions are no substitute for a budget allocation.
That makes another figure all the more striking: according to the 2026 annual report of the Baden-Württemberg Court of Audit, admission charges and fees for guided tours and events at eleven state museums and the ZKM covered just six per cent of their running costs in 2024. The Court of Audit recommends increasing revenue. The counter-question is: what price would public access pay for a higher cost-recovery rate? A museum is not a loss-making retail outlet but a public institution. Conservation, research and education cannot be measured by takings alone.
Free admission still comes at a cost
Berlin has shown what an open door can achieve. Museumssonntag recorded more than 2.2 million visits before it ended in December 2024. Surveys showed that it also reached new groups of visitors. People who never visit museums as a rule, however, remained difficult to reach. The project ended because of budget cuts. Regular access, of all things, was thus deemed an expendable cost.
The counterargument deserves to be taken seriously: affluent regular visitors also benefit from free admission. Admission revenue is lost, while supervision, cleaning and education may incur additional costs. Anyone demanding free admission without funding these consequences passes the bill on to staff and institutions. That is not socially inclusive cultural policy.
At the same time, it would be all too easy to reduce every problem to the price of admission. Language barriers, a lack of prior knowledge and the feeling that a museum is not for you do not disappear with a free ticket. But it does not follow that price is irrelevant. Those who cannot afford admission never even reach the other barriers.
Reliable access, not occasional favours
I am therefore not arguing for every museum to open free of charge every day, but for a binding guarantee of access: regular free opening times, including in the evenings, and straightforward concessions on other days. Access must not depend on the chance of a special event or on proof of individual financial need.
To achieve this, funding bodies must openly quantify lost revenue and actual additional costs, weigh them against other expenditure and provide reliable funding. Equally important are partnerships with schools and neighbourhood organisations, and the question of who still stays away despite everything. Anyone promising cultural participation must assess its impact, not simply count visitors. Nor must they subordinate artistic quality to majority taste.
Nobody owes a museum a visit. But a publicly funded museum owes society a genuine opportunity to visit. It is precisely under budgetary pressure that we discover whether cultural participation is a political responsibility — or merely a nice gesture for better times.
Original reviewed by the editors · 28 October 2026
