About me, and why this site is about three tickets
I am Xaver Obermeier and I walk people round Munich for a living. I grew up two tram stops from Odeonsplatz and I still cut through the Hofgarten rather than walking round it, which is how I know that the gravel is quicker and that almost nobody realises the garden is free. This site exists because of a conversation I have at the Residenz roughly once a week, and it always starts the same way: somebody is holding the wrong ticket, or standing at the wrong door, or both.
The one thing nobody tells you before you arrive
The Munich Residenz is not one attraction. It is three separate ticketed places sharing one address: the Residenzmuseum, the Schatzkammer and the Cuvilliés-Theater. The palace administration prices them separately on its own tariff page — about ten euros each for the museum and the treasury, a few euros for the theatre, a pair ticket for the first two and one ticket for all three at about twenty. That is not a secret. It is simply not what the internet says when you search the name.
And the parts do not keep the same hours. The museum and the treasury open every day of the year but five. The theatre does not: for most of the year it is shut on weekday mornings and opens at 2 pm, which the administration prints on its own opening-hours page. So people buy the combined ticket at half past nine, do the museum, walk round to the theatre at midday and find a locked door with their valid ticket in their hand. I have watched it happen. It is why the hours page leads with the theatre rather than burying it.
The doors are the other half of it. This block has more than one entrance and they are not interchangeable: the museum and treasury share one on the Residenzstraße and Max-Joseph-Platz side, the theatre has its own, and so does the Court Church of All Saints. Reviewers describe walking the whole building before finding the right one. That is on getting in, and it is the second most useful page here.
What I cannot sell you, which is most of it
This is the part an affiliate site usually leaves out, so it goes near the top. Not one listing on GetYourGuide sells plain admission to the Residenz. I checked all sixteen in my catalogue. The palace sells its own tickets, at its own desk and through its own shop, and no link of mine replaces that transaction or shaves a cent off it. Anyone who has not turned 18 is admitted for nothing, as are older students carrying a valid card from a general or vocational school.
Nor can I sell you the audio guide, because it is free. The administration publishes it in nine languages for the museum and the treasury, at no charge, and it does not cover the theatre. If you have read somewhere that the handset costs money at this palace, that is a different Bavarian palace and a different policy. The cloakroom is free too, which matters because bags over a stated size are not allowed in and have to go somewhere.
And I cannot sell you the Hofgarten. It is free, it is open, it is not inside any of the three tickets, and on a warm evening it is the best thing at this address. It is also the answer to the question people actually type, which is what is free in Munich (the garden).
What the platform does sell here, and it surprised me
Music. Of the 908 ratings left on the eleven Residenz listings I carry, 658 were left after a concert — nearly three quarters. The Saturday hour in the old court chapel has 389 ratings on its own, against 190 for the guided visit that walks you through the entire building. Divide those and you get 2.05: the concert has been rated more than twice as often as the tour.
I did not expect that and I would not have guessed it. It changed what this site is about. You can hear this building as well as look at it, in the chapel, in the rococo theatre or in the Max-Joseph-Saal, and almost nobody writing about the Residenz leads with that. So the concerts page is a pillar here rather than a footnote, and the reviews page opens with the arithmetic rather than with a testimonial.
Where the facts on this site come from
Prices, hours, closed days, the audio-guide languages, the bag rule and the photography rule come from the Bavarian Palace Administration, which runs the building. Where another source disagrees with it, it loses: the city portal still prints an older museum price and an older season, and the administration’s own tariff and opening-hours pages are what this site follows.
Two things here are not the administration’s and are labelled every time they appear. The description of this place as the largest inner-city palace in Germany belongs to muenchen.de, the city’s own portal, and the room count of about 130 is repeated by the city and by guidebooks rather than published by the palace. The Crown of Princess Blanche is sourced from Wikipedia, including the part where it probably belonged first to Anne of Bohemia, and the treasury page says so where it says it.
What a tour includes comes off its own listing page, read to the bottom rather than skimmed off the summary box, and quoted directly wherever the exact wording is doing the work. I have been confidently wrong about what a listing covers often enough to have stopped guessing.
Three things this site will not do
It will not give the Residenz a score out of five. Every rating in my catalogue belongs to a product — a guide’s two and a half hours, an evening of chamber music, a bus ticket. Averaging those into a mark for a state palace would be inventing a measurement and printing it as though somebody had taken it.
It will not put a country next to a reviewer’s name. The extraction that produced my 113 written reviews did not recover them, so no reviewer on this site has one. Guessing from a name is how a German reviewer becomes Austrian in print.
It will not price the annual or 14-day pass. Those passes exist and cover a long list of Bavarian sights, and no price for them was published on the page I read, so this site prints none. A plausible number is still a made-up one.
Who pays for all this
You do, indirectly, and only if you book something. A tour or a concert booked from a link here pays me a small percentage out of the platform’s end, and your price is untouched by it. The whole arrangement is on the disclosure page, along with the uncomfortable detail that the four best things at this address — the state ticket, the free handset, the free cloakroom and the free garden — pay me precisely nothing.
Corrections are the messages I answer first. Hours move, listings get rewritten overnight, a room closes for restoration. Tell me and I will change the page.