Seoul’s royal palaces do not share one closing day. Gyeongbokgung (경복궁) closes on Tuesdays. Changdeokgung (창덕궁), Changgyeonggung (창경궁), Deoksugung (덕수궁) and Jongmyo (종묘) all close on Mondays. Mix the list up and you arrive at a locked gate — the single most common wasted trip in the city, according to how often the mistake shows up in visitor complaints about the palaces.
Which day belongs to which site
- Gyeongbokgung (경복궁) — closed Tuesdays.
- Changdeokgung (창덕궁) — closed Mondays.
- Changgyeonggung (창경궁) — closed Mondays.
- Deoksugung (덕수궁) — closed Mondays.
- Jongmyo (종묘) — closed Mondays; also guided-tour-only on most open days (see below).
Monday is a Gyeongbokgung day. Tuesday is not. That single reversal is worth remembering on its own.
What happens when the closed day is a public holiday
This is the part every quick list leaves out, and it is the part that actually changes a trip. Korea Heritage Service, the government body that manages the royal palaces, runs a standing exception for holidays. If a palace’s normal closing day falls on a public holiday, the palace opens that day instead — and shifts its closure to the following weekday to make up for it.
So a Gyeongbokgung Tuesday that lands on a public holiday becomes an open Tuesday, with the closure pushed to Wednesday. A Changdeokgung, Changgyeonggung, Deoksugung or Jongmyo Monday that lands on a holiday works the same way: open on the Monday, closed the Tuesday after. This is a swap, not an extra closure — the palace still gets one closed day that week, just on a different date than usual.
Seollal and Chuseok are a separate case, and a bigger one. These are the two multi-day holiday blocks when much of the country travels at once, and their dates move every year with the lunar calendar. Palace schedules around these blocks can depart from both the weekly pattern and the single-holiday swap described above; some sites close across the holiday’s core days regardless of what weekday they fall on. There is no fixed rule to memorise here. The only reliable step is checking the published schedule for the specific year of travel on Korea Heritage Service’s own site before booking anything around it.
Changdeokgung’s Huwon runs on its own schedule
The Huwon, commonly called the Secret Garden, is Changdeokgung’s rear garden and it is not covered by the general admission ticket. It is a separate, timed, guided walk with a capped number of visitors per slot. It can sell out. It can also run to a different schedule than the main palace grounds — closed for the day, or not offering a slot, even when the palace itself is open and ticketed normally. Turning up on a day Changdeokgung is open, expecting to walk straight into the garden, is one of the most reliably repeated mistakes visitors make in Seoul. Booking a Huwon slot ahead, through Changdeokgung’s own reservation channel, is the only way to be certain of a place.
Jongmyo adds a second layer: the tour requirement
Jongmyo closes Mondays, same as Changdeokgung. But on most of the days it is open, entry is guided-tour-only — visitors join a scheduled group and follow a fixed route on a timetable, rather than walking in freely. The exceptions are Saturdays and Culture Day, the last Wednesday of each month, when the shrine can be walked without a tour slot. Stack a Monday closure on top of a tour-only Tuesday to Friday and a free-walk Saturday, and Jongmyo has arguably the most layered visiting pattern of any site covered on this page.
The policy that overrides most of this
Wearing hanbok is free entry to every one of the five palaces and to Jongmyo. This is a standing policy from Korea Heritage Service, not a promotion that quietly ended, and it holds regardless of which palace or which open day a visitor picks. The mechanics — what counts as hanbok, where to hire it, how the free entry is actually applied at the gate — are covered in full in the site’s guide to free palace entry in hanbok. It remains the single most useful thing a first-time visitor to these sites can be told.
None of the five palaces charges much to begin with. Structurally, admission across the group sits close to the price of a coffee, and the national museums nearby are free outright — the city charges properly for the modern add-ons built around old sites, not for the old sites themselves. Full background on how these five palaces and Jongmyo fit together as a set is in the Palaces & Shrines archive.
Getting to the right site on the right day
All five sites sit within central Seoul and are reached by subway. Fares are distance-based, so a T-money card gets tapped again on the way out — on the bus as well as the train — or the system charges through to the end of the line. The full mechanics of buying, topping up and tapping out are set out in how T-money actually works, and the wider transport picture, including the last-train cutoff that varies by line, sits in the Getting Around archive.
This page draws on Korea Heritage Service’s published palace management rules and on general national-holiday policy; both are checkable on the operator’s own site, and both are subject to change without much notice. How this site sources and checks claims like these is set out on the about page; what the site collects from a reader visiting it is covered in the privacy policy.
Access Seoul is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favorites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.