For most visitors, Hampton Court. It is closer, it is cheaper, it sits inside the London fare zones so your contactless card still works, and the ticket includes gardens, a Tudor maze and a playground. Windsor is the one to choose if you want a castle the King still uses, the royal tombs in St George's Chapel, or a proper day out of the city.
The two get compared constantly, and it is a fair comparison. Both are royal residences on the Thames west of London, both charge about £30, both are run by a charity, and both are closed two days a week. But one is a thirty-minute suburban train ride paid for with the card already in your pocket, and the other is a National Rail journey into the next county.
There is a full guide to Hampton Court Palace on this site, and another to the day trip out to Windsor. This page does one job only: it decides between them.
Hampton Court and Windsor compared
- Adult ticket
- Hampton Court £29.00 on a weekday, £32.00 at weekends and on bank holidays. Windsor £32.00 booked ahead, £36.00 at the gate
- Child ticket
- Hampton Court £14.50 or £16.00 for ages 5-15; Windsor £16.00 or £18.00 for ages 5-17. Children under five pay nothing at either
- Days closed
- Hampton Court: Mondays and Tuesdays in the weeks we checked in 2026. Windsor: every Tuesday and Wednesday
- Hours
- Hampton Court runs 10:00 to 17:30, with nobody admitted after 16:30. Windsor runs 10:00 to 17:15 from March to October, and stops admitting visitors at 16:00
- Journey from central London
- Hampton Court, 31 minutes direct out of Waterloo. Windsor, 56 minutes direct out of Waterloo; from Paddington roughly 35 minutes, changing at Slough
- Paying for the journey
- Hampton Court is in Zone 6, so Oyster and contactless work. Windsor is outside the zones and needs a National Rail ticket
- Time it takes
- Hampton Court: a full day. Windsor: 1½ to 2 hours inside, plus the travel
Tuesday shuts both of them
Start here, because it saves more money than any other paragraph on this page. Royal Collection Trust publishes a firm rule for Windsor: no Tuesdays, no Wednesdays, all year, bar two dates over Christmas that we come back to below. Historic Royal Palaces does not publish a weekly rule for Hampton Court, but in the weeks we have checked across 2026 the palace has been shut on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Tuesday is the one day neither palace will let you in. Windsor's closure is a stated rule; Hampton Court's appears as a calendar rather than a rule, so look up your own date on the palace's opening times page before you buy anything. Wednesday rules out Windsor. Monday has ruled out Hampton Court all year.
Windsor has a second kind of closure to watch for. The King works there, so official business can take rooms, or the whole site, out of use at short notice. Hampton Court takes rooms and routes out of service instead. The Mantegna Gallery will not reopen before the spring of 2027, and single gardens are fenced off for maintenance a few days at a stretch.
Photo: DiscoA340 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
What a family of four actually pays
Take a weekday in September 2026. Two adults are travelling off-peak from central London with a nine-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, and coming home the same evening.
| Line by line | Hampton Court | Windsor Castle |
|---|---|---|
| Admission, the grown-ups | £58.00 at the weekday rate | £64.00 if booked ahead |
| Admission, the children | £29.00 | £32.00 if booked ahead |
| Tickets, running total | £87.00 | £96.00 |
| Getting the grown-ups there and back | £20.80 in off-peak pay as you go, and never above £32.60 no matter how much else you ride that day | £35.60 in off-peak returns out of Waterloo |
| Getting the children there and back | Nothing, for under-11s accompanied on Transport for London services | £17.80, half of what an adult pays |
| The day, all in | About £107.80 | About £149.40 |
That is a difference of roughly £40 for one family on one day, and the gap widens if you travel at the weekend only at Windsor, or narrows if a railcard cuts the Windsor fares by a third. Which discount cards an overseas visitor can actually buy is covered in our page on UK train tickets.
Hampton Court is inside the Oyster zone and Windsor is not. The palace's station sits inside Zone 6, so the card already in your pocket works at the barrier and the £16.30 all-zone daily cap stops the fare running away. Windsor lies beyond the edge of that system, and a bank card tapped at Waterloo will not get you a valid ticket. Our guide to how Oyster and contactless capping works explains where the boundary falls.
One caution on the children's line. Free travel for under-11s is a Transport for London rule, covering the Tube, the DLR, the Overground and Elizabeth line trains. Hampton Court is served by National Rail, where the rules on accompanied children vary and a Zip photocard is sometimes needed. Sort that out before the day rather than at the barrier.
Door to door, which is where the day is won
South Western Railway serves Hampton Court from Waterloo twice an hour, and the journey took 31 minutes on a sample weekday morning. Trains terminate there, and it is a five-minute walk over the bridge to the entrance. Leave central London after breakfast and you are inside before 11:00 without trying.
Windsor is 56 minutes away if you take the direct service out of Waterloo. Going via Paddington cuts that to roughly 35 minutes but buys you a change at Slough. Either way, add ten minutes from the station, a security queue, and a further uphill walk of about ten minutes once you are through the gate. If your day is short, Windsor in half a day sets out the tightest version that still works.
There is a third way to reach Hampton Court that Windsor cannot match from London: the river. Public riverboats run in summer from Westminster, Richmond and Kingston, landing beside the palace. Four hours from Westminster is a long time afloat, which is why we suggest going one way by water and the other by train in our guide to Hampton Court by boat.
The shape of each day
Lay the two days side by side and the choice makes itself. Neither column below is a timetable to follow to the minute; both are simply what the opening hours and the journey times allow.
| Part of the day | Hampton Court | Windsor |
|---|---|---|
| Leave central London | About 09:30 from Waterloo | About 09:30 from Waterloo |
| Through the door | Around 10:15 | Around 11:00, after the walk up and the security queue |
| Late morning | Tudor courtyards, the Great Hall, the kitchens | The grand rooms and the dolls' house |
| Lunch | The Tiltyard Cafe, or the riverside outside the gate | The town, five minutes below the walls |
| Early afternoon | The Baroque route | The chapel, then the precincts |
| Mid afternoon | The gardens, the maze and the Magic Garden | Eton, the Long Walk, or the shops |
| Last admission | 16:30 | 16:00, March to October |
| Back in central London | About 45 minutes after you leave | About 70 minutes after you leave |
Read down the two columns and one thing stands out. Hampton Court can hold you for six and a half hours if you let it, and the palace decides when your day ends. Windsor hands the day back to you after about two hours, and what fills the rest is the town, the park and the train.
Neither is worse; they are different products. If you want one place to absorb a whole day, take the Tudor palace. If you want a change of scene, a small English town and a long avenue of trees, take the castle. Where either fits in a longer trip is covered in how many days you need in London.
A Tudor kitchen against a working palace
Hampton Court gives you two palaces in one. The Tudor half belongs to Henry VIII: Base Court and Clock Court, the Great Hall under its carved roof, the Haunted Gallery, and kitchens on an industrial scale, built to put two meals a day in front of several hundred courtiers. The Baroque half is Wren's, designed for the joint monarchs who followed a century and a half later, all painted ceilings and formal state rooms. They are separate routes, which is why the visit fills a day.
Windsor gives you one palace, still in use, and a much shorter route through it: grand rooms, a famous dolls' house and a chapel full of royal tombs. We take that collection apart room by room, against the Crown Jewels, in Tower of London or Windsor Castle. What matters for this comparison is the shape it leaves your day in, and that is the next section.
One thing only Windsor has: a guard ceremony, on a couple of mornings each week. Hampton Court has nothing of the kind, so if a marching band is on your list, that settles it.
With children under ten
This is not close. The Hampton Court ticket takes in a hedge maze laid out around 1700 and still harder to escape than it looks, plus the Magic Garden, a play area of towers, tunnels and one large dragon. Add the kitchens, which children find far more interesting than portraits, and you have a day that does not need bribery.
Windsor's offer for younger children is the Dolls' House, free downloadable trails for ages 7 to 11, and a family multimedia guide. It works, but it is an indoor visit of about two hours with a long train ride either side, and the climb from the town is steep with a good deal of walking once you are up there. Big rucksacks and pushchairs have to be left behind before the grand rooms.
Our wider family guide to London has more on which paid attractions repay the money with young children.
When it rains
Hampton Court keeps most of its value in bad weather, because the two palace routes and the kitchens are all indoors. What you lose is the half of the ticket that is outside: the maze, the Privy Garden, the Great Vine and the Magic Garden. On a wet day the palace is still worth the fare; on a fine one it is worth considerably more, which is an argument for watching the forecast and booking late.
Windsor is more exposed than people expect. The rooms and the chapel are under a roof, but the approach, the courtyards and the climb to the entrance are not, and nothing covers the walk from the station. A wet day there is a wet day with two train journeys wrapped around it.
A weekday at Hampton Court costs £3 less per adult than a weekend one. Historic Royal Palaces prices the palace off-peak on weekdays and peak at weekends and on bank holidays, so two adults save £6.00 simply by choosing the right day. Windsor charges the same price every day it opens, and penalises you £4.00 per adult for buying at the gate instead of online.
Winter pulls them further apart
Both palaces shrink between November and February, but not in the same direction, and the gap is wide enough to change the answer.
Windsor simply gets shorter. From 1 November to the end of February the castle opens at 10:00, stops admitting visitors at 15:00 and closes at 16:15. With 56 minutes on the train each way, that means leaving London by mid-morning to be certain of getting in, and travelling home in the dark. One oddity is worth knowing: Tuesday 22 and Tuesday 29 December 2026 are the only Tuesdays in the year when Windsor opens at all.
Hampton Court does something stranger. From 28 November 2026 to 3 January 2027 it runs as the Winter Palace, with a festive programme built into the ticket. The standard winter day is shorter than Windsor's, with the last visitors admitted at 14:30 and the gates closed at 16:30. But on selected evenings the palace stays open until 19:30, admitting people as late as 17:30, which is something Windsor never offers at any time of year.
Prices move as well. A Winter Palace adult ticket costs £32.00 on an off-peak day and £35.00 at peak, and off-peak applies on only a handful of term-time weekdays in December. Windsor holds at £32.00 booked ahead all year round. So in winter the two are level on price, and the palace that was clearly cheaper in September is no longer the obvious saving. Our guide to London in winter has the wider seasonal picture, and Christmas in London covers the festive programmes.
The free ground next door
Both palaces sit beside something green that costs nothing, and in both cases it is worth an hour.
At Hampton Court it is Bushy Park, about fifteen minutes' walk away: royal parkland with deer grazing on it and none of the crowds that Richmond Park draws. The riverside path continues towards Richmond and, eventually, to Kew, a flat eleven-mile walk that takes three to four hours if you want a long afternoon.
At Windsor it is the Long Walk, an avenue of trees driving dead straight out of the castle into Windsor Great Park, and the view back along it is the one on the postcards. Cross the pedestrian bridge from Windsor & Eton Riverside and you are in Eton in five minutes.
Which one to drop
On a trip of three or four days, drop both and keep the Tower of London. Neither palace earns a place on a short first visit while the centre of the city is still unexplored.
On a trip of five days or more, add one of them as a day of its own. Our five-day itinerary puts a royal palace on day four for exactly that reason. Choose Hampton Court if you have children, if the weather looks reasonable, or if you want to keep the day cheap and flexible. Choose Windsor if you want the feeling of leaving London behind, or if royal tombs and a castle the King still uses are the point.
Two footnotes. If you came looking for the summer flower show in the palace gardens, read what happened to the Hampton Court Flower Show before you plan around it. And before buying a sightseeing pass, find out which of these two it actually admits you to: our worked sums on whether a London pass pays off rarely favour families.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hampton Court or Windsor Castle better for a day trip?
Hampton Court for most people. It is half the journey, roughly £40 cheaper for a family of four once travel is counted, and the ticket covers gardens, the maze and a playground as well as the palace. Windsor is the better trip if you want a working royal residence and the tombs in St George's Chapel.
Does contactless work on the train to Hampton Court?
Yes. The station is inside Zone 6, so tapping works at both ends of the journey and the all-zone daily cap applies. Windsor sits beyond the London fare boundary: neither Oyster nor contactless nor a Travelcard will cover it, and you buy a National Rail ticket instead.
Which days are Hampton Court and Windsor Castle closed?
Windsor admits nobody on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Hampton Court has kept Mondays and Tuesdays clear in the weeks we checked during 2026, but Historic Royal Palaces publishes that as a calendar rather than a fixed rule, so look up your own date on its opening times page.
How long does each palace take?
Give Hampton Court a full day: the Tudor rooms, the kitchens, the later state apartments and the grounds amount to four visits in one. Royal Collection Trust puts Windsor at 90 minutes to two hours indoors, but the return journey and the climb from the station turn that into a day anyway.
Can I visit both in one trip?
Yes, on a longer stay, but not in one day and preferably not on consecutive days. They are both palaces full of state rooms, and seeing them back to back blurs them together. Put something unlike either between them.
Sources
- Historic Royal Palaces - Hampton Court Palace tickets and prices (checked September 2026)
- Historic Royal Palaces - Hampton Court Palace opening times (checked September 2026)
- Historic Royal Palaces - Getting to Hampton Court Palace (checked September 2026)
- Royal Collection Trust - Windsor Castle tickets, prices and opening times (checked September 2026)
- National Rail Enquiries - Times and fares, London Waterloo to Windsor & Eton Riverside (checked September 2026)
- Transport for London - Single Fare Finder (checked September 2026)
- Transport for London - Caps on pay as you go fares (checked September 2026)
- The Household Division - Changing the Guard calendar (checked September 2026)