So which combo is right for you? Moco on its own at €19.95, Moco plus a one-hour canal cruise, or a slow-build morning at the Rijks or Van Gogh and an end-of-day flip into the contemporary chaos of Moco for the contrast? The answer changes the whole shape of your day, and I’d argue most people pick the wrong one.
Moco stands for Modern Contemporary. The museum opened in 2016 and is privately run by Lionel Logchies and Kim Logchies-Prins. The two of them put together what is now the largest privately-owned Banksy collection in the world, and stitched in Warhol, Hirst, Kusama, Basquiat, KAWS, Daniel Arsham, and a few rooms of immersive digital projection on top. It’s small. You can see all of it in 60 to 90 minutes. That’s a feature, not a bug, and it’s why the timing question matters.
- In a Hurry? Three Picks
- So which combo is actually right for you?
- Pricing, the actually useful version
- Three Moco tickets worth booking
- 1. Moco Museum Entrance Tickets with Banksy and More:
- 2. Moco Museum Entry Ticket and Canal Cruise:
- 3. Canal Cruise and Moco Museum Combined Ticket:
- What’s actually inside
- Booking the timing right
- Getting to Museumplein
- Photography rules
- How Moco compares to the museums next door
- Moco Amsterdam vs Moco London
- Practical things people forget
- If Moco isn’t for you
- One more thing about contemporary art in Europe
- More Netherlands guides
In a Hurry? Three Picks
Best basic ticket: Moco Museum Entrance Tickets with Banksy & More from $18. Skip-the-line, audio guide, full collection access, the cleanest way in.
Best combo with the canals: Moco Museum Entry Ticket and Canal Cruise from $32. One ticket, one hour on the water, one hour in the galleries, packs a half-day for less than two separate bookings.
Best premium combo: Canal Cruise and Moco Museum Combined Ticket from $47. Skip-the-line on both, more flexible time slots, the version to pick if you’re not on a schedule.
So which combo is actually right for you?
The three options break down like this. Take 30 seconds to figure out which one fits your day, because the differences are bigger than the price gap suggests.
Option 1: Moco alone, 90 minutes, €19.95. Pick this if your time in Amsterdam is short, you’ve already done the Rijks and Van Gogh on a previous trip, or you’re a street-art person whose patience for Dutch Golden Age portraits is running low. The basic ticket is the most popular product on the market and for a reason: it’s the cleanest version of the experience. Our review of the entrance ticket walks through what’s included.
Option 2: Moco plus canal cruise, half day, around $32. Pick this if you want a packed afternoon that doesn’t ask you to think hard. The cruise is one hour on the water and the Moco is one hour off it, so you get a full half-day with no decisions to make. Best for first-time visitors and for groups where one person wants the art and another wants the city scenery and neither wants to argue. We compare cruise styles in our Amsterdam canal cruise guide if you want to understand what the included cruise actually looks like.
Option 3: Rijks or Van Gogh in the morning, Moco in the late afternoon. This is the connoisseur’s pick and the one I’d push for. Start at the Rijksmuseum at opening (heavy art, big rooms, deep history). Lunch on Museumplein. Then walk 90 seconds across the lawn to Moco for the contemporary contrast. The shift from a Rembrandt self-portrait to a Banksy stencil with the same light and the same building style outside is the most genuinely educational hour you can have in Amsterdam, and almost nobody books it that way.
Pricing, the actually useful version
The basic Amsterdam ticket is €19.95 for an adult, €17.95 for a youth (7-17) or a student with ID, and free for children under 7. Children under 18 cannot enter the dedicated Banksy room marked 18+ (it includes work with strong political imagery and adult themes), so a family with younger kids is going to skip about a quarter of the museum. Worth knowing before you book.
Combo tickets work out around $32 with a one-hour canal cruise, $47 for the premium skip-the-line on both. The canal-cruise combos do not include drinks. If you want the evening cocktail-cruise vibe, those are separate products you’d add on top.
The iAmsterdam City Card does not include Moco. If you have one and you’re trying to do everything else for free, Moco is a paid extra. The Rijks and Van Gogh on the same square are both included on the card, which is the small irony of museum-pass economics in this city.
Three Moco tickets worth booking
Of the four bookable Moco products on the standard platforms, three are genuinely worth your money. The fourth is a duplicate listing of the basic ticket and you should ignore it.
1. Moco Museum Entrance Tickets with Banksy and More: $18
This is the workhorse of the three, and where most first-time visitors should land. Our full review of the basic Moco ticket covers the practicalities of the timed entry and why the audio guide is worth using. There’s a second listing for the same product on a different operator slot, useful only if your preferred time is sold out on the primary one. Pick this if you want one ticket, no extras, and no decisions.
2. Moco Museum Entry Ticket and Canal Cruise: $32
The cruise pier is a 12-minute walk from the museum, so the order matters: do the cruise first then walk to the Moco. Our review of the Moco plus canal-cruise combo breaks down the timing trick. A solid pick for a first afternoon in Amsterdam.
3. Canal Cruise and Moco Museum Combined Ticket: $47
If you don’t want to chase tight booking windows, this is the one. The premium also covers a higher-spec cruise boat (open-roof in good weather, smaller capacity than the budget glass-tops). Our review of the premium combined ticket goes into the boat differences. Pick this if your day in Amsterdam is unstructured and you want to drift.
What’s actually inside
The collection is split across three floors of the villa plus a basement and a back garden. The hang rotates, but the bones below stay constant.
Banksy on the ground floor. The largest privately-owned Banksy collection in the world, with at least one of the major works on view at any time. Girl With Balloon (the original spray-painted version, not the shredded auction-house edition), Flower Thrower, Kissing Coppers, Laugh Now (the chimpanzees with sandwich boards), and a rotating wall of smaller stencils on actual doors and metal sheets pulled off the streets where they were painted.
Warhol prints on the first floor. Marilyn Monroe, Mao, Campbell’s Soup, the Cow Wallpaper. The Warhol room sits next to a Damien Hirst Spot Painting wall and a Basquiat case, which is the kind of pop-art-meets-neo-expressionism three-way that you’d usually have to go to MoMA in New York to see in one room. Moco does it in three steps.
Kusama Infinity Mirror Room on the second floor. One of the smaller mirror rooms (it’s a household-cupboard-sized space, not the giant cathedral-scale rooms at the Tate or the Hirshhorn), and you get about 30 seconds inside before the next group rotates in. Worth the queue for the photo, but go in with realistic expectations about how long you stay.
Daniel Arsham, KAWS, immersive digital rooms. The newer wing of the collection. Arsham’s eroded sculptures, KAWS Companion figures, and a series of digital-projection rooms that loop fast-edit Van-Gogh-style sequences across the walls and floor. The projection rooms are loud. If you’re sound-sensitive or travelling with younger kids, the audio guide flags the rooms to avoid.
The 18+ Banksy room. A separate small space with a “no under 18s” sign on the door. The pieces inside lean political (war, surveillance, refugee crisis) and sexual. Adults often spend longer in this room than in any other. If you’re going as a family with teens around 14-15, the call is yours, but the museum staff hold to the policy at the door.
The garden out back. A small enclosed yard with a few sculptural pieces (Marcel Wanders’ “Tempter” giant horseback figure, an oversized red gummy bear, rotating temporary commissions). Five minutes’ worth of time, but the photo opportunity is genuinely good and it’s where most visitors finish their visit.
Booking the timing right
The museum opens at 9am most days and closes at 7pm. Last entry is one hour before closing. Sundays the place opens at 10am.
The traffic curve is brutal between 11am and 5pm. Friday and Saturday afternoons in summer the queues at the Banksy room and the Kusama mirror box can hit 20-30 minutes each. Outside that window the museum runs about half-empty. Discounted tickets are sometimes offered for off-peak weekday slots, especially the late-evening 5-7pm window in summer when the museum is open until 7pm.
If you’ve booked online (and you should, the door queue is genuinely worse than the room queues inside), your timed slot is a 30-minute window. Show up within that window and the staff scan your phone. Late by 10 minutes is fine. Late by an hour is a rebook situation.
Getting to Museumplein
Tram 2 or 12 from Amsterdam Centraal stops at Rijksmuseum. From there it’s a 90-second walk diagonally across the lawn. If you’re already in the Museum Quarter, walk: the streets are quiet on the south side and the route is well-signed.
Bike parking is on the south side of the building. Cars are not realistic in this part of central Amsterdam, but if you have to drive there’s the underground Q-Park Museumplein which puts you under the lawn and 90 seconds from any of the four major museums. Expensive.
From Schiphol, take train 4 minutes to Centraal then tram 12 to the Rijksmuseum stop. Total time, including platform changes, is about 35-40 minutes. Cheaper than a taxi by a factor of five.
Photography rules
Photography is allowed throughout the museum, no flash, no tripods. This is the loosest photo policy on Museumplein (the Rijks has a no-photo rule on a few of its star paintings, the Van Gogh is no-photo in the temporary exhibitions). For social-media-friendly shots Moco is the easiest pick of the three.
The Kusama Infinity Mirror Room has its own rule: phones only, you go in alone or in pairs, you have 30 seconds, the staff watching the door does the timing. Tripods, selfie sticks and proper cameras are not allowed inside that one room. Get the shot you want quickly or leave with nothing.
Pink stairs and Banksy stencils are the two photo magnets. If you want either uncrowded, the first 15 minutes after opening on a weekday is your only realistic window.
How Moco compares to the museums next door
You’re spoilt for choice on Museumplein. Here’s the comparison so you can decide what to pair with what.
Rijksmuseum. Two hours minimum, four hours if you want depth. The Night Watch room alone takes 30 minutes to do well. Pair with Moco if you have a full day, do Rijks first thing in the morning when the rooms are empty. Our Rijksmuseum guide covers what to prioritise if your time is short.
Van Gogh Museum. Two to three hours. Smaller than the Rijks but the queues are longer because the building has a strict capacity. Pair with Moco for a “two contemporaries from different centuries” day; Vincent’s Sunflowers and Banksy’s Flower Thrower in the same afternoon is one of the better juxtapositions in European museum-hopping. Our Van Gogh guide walks through booking strategy.
The Concertgebouw and the Stedelijk. The Concertgebouw is the concert hall, not really a museum visit unless you book a tour. The Stedelijk is more academic-modernist than Moco (Mondrian, Malevich, Beuys, big conceptual rooms) and a better pick if you find Moco too pop-leaning.
Moco Amsterdam vs Moco London
There’s a Moco branch in London at Marble Arch (and a third in Barcelona). The London one is bigger, has a better-lit Banksy hang, and is the only place to see some of the Banksy works that aren’t on rotation in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam one is the original, has the better building, and sits in the world’s best museum cluster.
If you’re doing a UK-EU trip and you’ve got both cities on the list, do London for the Banksy depth and Amsterdam for the location and the building. Our Moco London guide covers the booking differences (London uses a different pier/tube alignment, and the timed slots run on tighter half-hour windows).
Practical things people forget
Bring ID. Student tickets and Youth tickets both require photo ID at the door. The staff check.
The cafe inside is small and the queue at lunch is longer than the entry queue. Eat before or after, not during. The Concertgebouw cafe across the lawn is a five-minute walk, much better, and serves until 5pm.
There’s no cloakroom for big bags. Backpack-sized is fine, suitcase-sized is not. If you’ve just arrived at Centraal and you’re trying to museum-hop on the way to your hotel, leave the bag at the station’s luggage lockers (€5 for 24 hours) before you ride the tram down.
The audio guide is included with most tickets but not all of them. Check before you book. The audio adds about 20 minutes to a visit, and on the Banksy works specifically it’s worth the time: the curators worked the political-context narration carefully and it pulls more out of each piece than the wall labels.
If Moco isn’t for you
The Moco isn’t a museum that lands with everyone. If you want art history rather than pop culture, the Stedelijk’s collection has more historical weight. If you want big rooms and a slow visit, the Rijks gives both. And if you want sheer depth in a single artist, the Van Gogh has more Vincents than anywhere else on the planet.
The Moco lands hardest with people who like their art loud, fast, and a bit irreverent. Banksy-people, KAWS-people, Kusama-people. If that’s you, an hour at Moco beats three hours at almost anywhere else in the city.
One more thing about contemporary art in Europe
If you’re building a longer trip and Moco is one stop in a string of contemporary-art museums across Europe, the natural next step is Madrid’s Reina Sofía. Picasso’s Guernica is there, the rest of the collection is mid-20th-century to present, and the curatorial vibe is closer to Moco’s politicised contemporary register than anywhere on the Rijksmuseum side of the spectrum. Combine the two with a flight in between and you get the best contemporary-art weekend Europe currently offers.
More Netherlands guides
If you’re booking Moco as one stop on a longer Amsterdam day, our Rijksmuseum guide and Van Gogh guide cover the two natural pairings on the same square, and the canal cruise guide walks through which boat to pick for the combo. For the broader Amsterdam afternoon, our Heineken Experience guide is the right call if you want to swap one museum for a brewery.