Museums that are free every single day
The permanent collections of the City of Paris museums are free all year, and they are not consolation prizes. The Musée Carnavalet tells the whole story of Paris in restored 16th-century mansions. The Petit Palais holds Courbet, Monet and Cézanne inside a building that is itself worth the visit. The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris has Matisse and Dufy's enormous La Fée Électricité. The Maison de Victor Hugo on Place des Vosges is the writer's actual apartment. Add the Musée Cognacq-Jay for 18th-century painting and the Musée Bourdelle for sculpture in the artist's studio. Only temporary exhibitions charge. Together that is easily two full days of world-class art without a ticket.
Monuments and churches you can walk into
Notre-Dame is free to enter since its reopening, and so is every other church in the city: Saint-Sulpice with its Delacroix murals and gnomon, Saint-Eustache near Les Halles, the Panthéon's exterior square, and the Sacré-Cœur basilica itself, where only the dome climb is paid. Père-Lachaise cemetery is free and is effectively an open-air sculpture park with Chopin, Wilde and Morrison. The Palais-Royal courtyard with the Buren columns, the covered passages of the 2nd arrondissement, and the Grande Mosquée courtyard all cost nothing. First Sunday of the month adds the national museums, including the Louvre in low season and the Orsay year-round — free but very busy.
Views that cost nothing
The steps of Sacré-Cœur give you the whole city at sunset without paying for a tower. Parc de Belleville, less known, gives an arguably better one with fewer people. The rooftop terraces of the Galeries Lafayette and Printemps department stores are free and put the Opéra Garnier at your feet. The top of the Institut du Monde Arabe has a free terrace over the Seine and Notre-Dame. Pont de Bir-Hakeim and the Passerelle Debilly are the two Eiffel Tower views photographers use when Trocadéro is full. And the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, built on an old quarry with a cliff-top temple, is the most surprising green space in the city.
Keep it handy while in Paris
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Water, parks and everyday Paris
Around 1,200 public drinking fountains work all over the city, including the cast-iron green Wallace fountains that have been running since 1872 and a handful of fountains dispensing free sparkling water, which is a genuinely odd civic gift. Our Drinking Water map shows the nearest one wherever you are. The big parks — Luxembourg, Tuileries, Buttes-Chaumont, Monceau, Vincennes and Boulogne — are free, have public toilets, and are where the city actually relaxes. Add the banks of the Seine, pedestrianised on the Right Bank in summer, and the Canal Saint-Martin in the evening, where Parisians sit on the quay with a bottle and a paper bag of cheese. That is the free version of the city, and it is not a downgrade.
How to keep the rest of the day cheap
Free water plus a bakery lunch is the standard Paris budget move: a baguette sandwich is €5 to €7 anywhere off the tourist axes, and the boulangerie will fill your bottle if you ask nicely. Museums are cheapest for under-26 EU residents, who enter national museums free with an ID — including the Louvre and Orsay. Standing at the bar of a café costs roughly half what sitting on the terrace costs, and the price list must legally be displayed at both rates. Métro tickets are only worth buying in a carnet of ten. And the one thing genuinely worth spending on is a booked slot rather than a queue-skip reseller ticket: the official sites are always cheaper. Everything else in Paris will happily take your money without giving you anything back.