In short
There is no single official price list for Samarkand. The city museum-reserve publishes 20,000 som for Gur-e-Amir on the monument’s own page and 30,000 som on its official tariff, while the platform it links to sells the same entry for 71,500 som. In practice, budget 100,000 som (about US$8.50) for the Registan and 50,000–80,000 som for each other major monument, in cash, at the gate.
All figures checked 26 August 2026 against the Samarkand State Museum-Reserve, the Registan Directorate and iTicket.uz. Converted at the Central Bank of Uzbekistan rate of 11,778.52 som to the dollar.
On this page
- The contradiction, in one building
- It is not one monument, and it is not random
- Three generations of tariff, none of them withdrawn
- What the official price list actually says
- The Registan is a separate world
- Two famous sites have no official price at all
- Opening hours, and the weekend myth you will be told
- The unified ticket that was supposed to arrive
- What to actually do
- What we could not verify
Samarkand is the one great Silk Road city where you cannot find out what a ticket costs before you arrive. That is not a failure of research. We spent a day tracing every official source we could find, and the result is that the body which administers the city’s monuments publishes two different foreign-visitor prices for the same mausoleum on its own website — and sells that mausoleum online at a third.
Below is every figure we could verify, labelled by what kind of source it came from, checked on 26 August 2026. Where nothing official exists, we say so rather than repeating a number from a blog.
The contradiction, in one building
Gur-e-Amir — the Amir Temur Mausoleum, where Tamerlane is buried — is a single indivisible monument. There is no ambiguity about what “entry to Gur-e-Amir” means, and no second building that could be confused with it. Here is what the Samarkand State Museum-Reserve, the organisation that administers it, says a foreign adult pays:
| Source | Foreign adult | What kind of source this is |
|---|---|---|
| Museum-reserve, the monument’s own page | 20,000 som (US$1.70) | Official website |
| Museum-reserve, its official price list | 30,000 som (US$2.55) | Official published tariff |
| iTicket.uz, linked from the museum-reserve’s own homepage | 71,500 som (US$6.07) | Official sales channel |
The highest figure is 3.6 times the lowest. All three were live on the day we checked. The first two sit on the same website, a few clicks apart.
It is not one monument, and it is not random
The same split runs through Samarkand’s best-known sites — and, revealingly, does not run through the small ones.
| Monument | Monument page | Price list | Sold online at | Reported paid at the gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gur-e-Amir | 20,000 | 30,000 | 71,500 | 75,000 (Dec 2025) |
| Ulugh Beg Observatory | 20,000 | 30,000 | 71,500 | 80,000 (Jun 2026) |
| Bibi-Khanym Mosque | 20,000 | 30,000 | 38,500 | 75,000 (Oct 2025) |
| Afrosiyab Museum | 25,000 | 30,000 | 77,000 | not reported |
| Nodir Devonbegi Madrasah | 25,000 | 25,000 | 27,500 | not reported |
| Museum of Uzbek Culture History | 25,000 | 25,000 | 27,500 | not reported |
The quiet museums are internally consistent to within a rounding error. It is only the high-traffic monuments — the ones every visitor actually goes to — where the official numbers diverge by two to four times. Gate reports come from dated traveller accounts, not from any official source, and are given here only to show which figure tracks reality.
Three generations of tariff, none of them withdrawn
The most likely explanation is not corruption or a scam. It is that Samarkand has raised its prices twice without taking the old pages down.
The oldest generation — 20,000 som — survives on the individual monument pages. A middle generation of 25,000 to 30,000 som sits on the consolidated price list. And the current generation reaches the public only through the sales channel, because that is the only page anyone has a commercial reason to keep accurate.
One detail supports this. Every price on iTicket is exactly 1.1 times a round number: 27,500 is 25,000 plus ten per cent, 71,500 is 65,000 plus ten per cent, 77,000 is 70,000 plus ten per cent. For the cheap museums the underlying base matches the published tariff exactly. For the headline monuments it does not — the base is roughly 2.2 times what the tariff says. That reading is our inference from the arithmetic, not a sourced fact; iTicket does not state what the ten per cent is, and Uzbekistan’s VAT is twelve per cent, which argues against it being tax.
What the official price list actually says
This is the Samarkand State Museum-Reserve’s published tariff in full, for the sites it covers. It splits visitors into Uzbek citizens (seasonal rates) and a single category covering CIS citizens and foreign tourists together.
| Site | Uzbek adult, in season | Foreign / CIS adult | Foreign / CIS child |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bibi-Khanym Mausoleum | 5,000 | 25,000 | 15,000 |
| Gur-e-Amir | 5,000 | 30,000 | 20,000 |
| Ulugh Beg Observatory complex | 5,000 | 30,000 | 20,000 |
| Bibi-Khanym Congregational Mosque | 5,000 | 30,000 | 20,000 |
| Afrosiyab Museum | 5,000 | 30,000 | 20,000 |
| Museum of Uzbek Culture History | 5,000 | 25,000 | 15,000 |
| Regional Studies Museum | 5,000 | 25,000 | 15,000 |
| Nodir Devonbegi Madrasah | 5,000 | 25,000 | 15,000 |
| House-museums (Ayni, Behbudiy, Abdurasulov) | 5,000 | 25,000 | 15,000 |
The same document sets photography permission at 20,000 to 40,000 som and video at 20,000 to 40,000 som, a group excursion for up to twenty people at 20,000 to 50,000 som, and a full-day city tour at 500,000 to 800,000 som.
Two things are worth knowing about this document. It carries no order number, no decree reference and no effective date — the only temporal marker anywhere on the page is a sidebar banner for a 2023 state slogan. And it lists Bibi-Khanym twice, as a mausoleum and as a mosque, at different prices. Those are genuinely two separate buildings on opposite sides of the same street, which is the one case where sources disagreeing may simply be describing different tickets.
The Registan is a separate world
The Registan does not appear on the museum-reserve’s tariff at all, and is not sold on iTicket. It has its own directorate and its own ticket portal.
The directorate’s published position, from an interview republished on its official site in October 2025, is 100,000 som (US$8.49) for foreign visitors, 15,000 som for Uzbek citizens and 10,000 som for schoolchildren, with free entry for Uzbek schoolchildren on Tuesdays and Fridays. Visitors in May, June and July 2026 all report paying exactly 100,000 som, so this is the single most reliable number in Samarkand.
It has also risen fastest. At the launch of online sales in December 2020, the same directorate quoted 40,000 som for foreigners. That is a 150 per cent increase in under five years, which is the real reason so much published advice is wrong.
Two famous sites have no official price at all
Shah-i-Zinda is not on the museum-reserve tariff, is not sold on iTicket, and has no directorate page of its own. Traveller reports across late 2025 and 2026 span 40,000 to 80,000 som. We are not printing one of those as fact.
Hazrat Khizr Mosque, which adjoins the Islam Karimov mausoleum and is a working place of pilgrimage, appears on no tariff anywhere. The only evidence we found for it being free is a traveller review from 2023. Treat it as unconfirmed and carry cash.
Opening hours, and the weekend myth you will be told
Every museum-reserve page carries a line stating that Saturday and Sunday are days off for the museum’s academic staff. The sites themselves do not close. Aggregators and listing sites routinely mistranslate this into a weekly closing day, and at least one major platform currently shows the Registan as closed on Fridays — which is simply wrong.
The Registan’s own site gives 07:00 to midnight from 20 February to 20 November, and 08:00 to 20:00 outside that window, with no closing day. A separate official announcement from November 2025 gives 08:00 to 22:00 for the winter period. Both are live and they contradict each other; we could not establish which is being worked.
Museum-reserve sites open 09:00 to 18:00, with the Ulugh Beg Observatory listed at 09:00 to 17:00.
Entry is free at all state museums on the first Sunday of every month, and free for under-18s and an accompanying adult on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The unified ticket that was supposed to arrive
There is a fix in the pipeline. Presidential resolution PQ-348, dated 19 November 2025, mandates a single national ticketing system covering every ticketed tourism site, museums and cultural heritage properties included, from 1 July 2026.
We could find no news coverage after December 2025 confirming that it launched, was delayed or was cancelled, and as of late August 2026 Samarkand’s sites still sell separately through at least three different channels. A unified Uzbek museum pass was also proposed in 2006 and never happened.
What to actually do
Carry cash in som and buy at each gate. Budget 100,000 som for the Registan and 50,000 to 80,000 som for each of Gur-e-Amir, Shah-i-Zinda, Bibi-Khanym and the Observatory — around US$25 to US$40 for the main circuit, plus photography fees at museum-reserve sites. Do not prepay online expecting it to be cheaper, and do not trust a price you read anywhere, including here, without expecting it to have moved.
If you are arriving from abroad, read our guide to Uzbekistan’s registration rules before you book accommodation — that part of the law is far clearer than the ticketing is.
What we could not verify
We could not locate any published legal instrument — decree, order or ministerial act — setting entry prices for Samarkand’s monuments. We searched Uzbekistan’s legal database, the government heritage portals and Uzbek- and Russian-language news. The 2022 resolution on museum services covers opening hours and free access for vulnerable groups but sets no prices; the 2025 resolution mandates a unified ticket but sets no prices either. The museum-reserve’s price list carries no order number. So far as we can establish, there is nothing in the public domain for any of these figures to be right or wrong against.
We also could not retrieve the Registan’s own tariff table, which is served by a JavaScript application; the 100,000 som figure rests on the director’s statement plus consistent 2026 visitor reports. We could not confirm whether iTicket’s ten per cent uplift is commission, tax or a booking fee, and therefore whether the gate price at Gur-e-Amir is 65,000 or 71,500 som. And we could not establish which body — the museum-reserve or the Registan directorate — actually holds the ticketing right for Gur-e-Amir, Bibi-Khanym and Shah-i-Zinda. Both organisations list them.
All som figures were converted at the Central Bank of Uzbekistan’s rate for 26 August 2026, 11,778.52 som to the US dollar.
Photo: Вечерний Гур-Эмир by Arina Pan, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.