Edinburgh Castle · Open all year · Timed entry
Almost everything you have come to see inside Edinburgh Castle is under a roof and open all year, so no season shuts anything down. What changes is the light, the crowd, and whether the Esplanade in front of the gate is clear or carrying the 8,800-seat arena that goes up for the Tattoo. The season sets those. The hour you book decides how much of the castle you actually get.
The short answer
Edinburgh Castle is open year-round and closes only on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, although winter hours are shorter and the last entry moves an hour earlier. That makes the time of day the first thing to settle, and the only part of the decision still open to you once the flights are booked. Historic Environment Scotland asks visitors to allow at least two hours, so a 9:30am slot gives you the fullest visit. The latest entry that still leaves those two hours is 4pm from April to September, and 3pm through the winter.
If your dates are open, May is the best month for a first visit. It is Edinburgh’s sunniest at 195 hours against August’s 160, it is among the three driest of the year, and by mid-month there are more than sixteen hours of daylight. January and February are the quietest: Edinburgh Airport handled 949,376 passengers in January 2025 against 1,781,758 in July. In return the days are short, 7h35m in mid-January, and the castle closes at 5pm.
What the month changes most is what stands in front of the castle. A temporary arena occupies the Esplanade from about May to October, so the clear approach to the frontage belongs to November to April. The arena is at its largest for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, 6 to 28 August in 2027, when the forecourt becomes a working stadium. Those are the busiest evenings of the year around the castle, and the show is a separate ticket from a daytime visit. And from about 25 October to 7 February the sun sets before the winter close. That is the one stretch of the year when you can be on the gun terraces as the city lights come on.
| Sunshine, May | 195 h | |
|---|---|---|
| Sunshine, August | 160 h | |
| Daylight, mid-June | 17h 34m | |
| Daylight, mid-December | 7h 01m | |
| Visitors by air, January | 53 | |
| Visitors by air, July | 100 |
Sunshine is total hours in the month and daylight is measured at mid-month. Visitors by air is an index of monthly passengers at Edinburgh Airport with July 2025 set to 100. Higher is better in the first two blocks and worse in the third, and no month wins all three.
If your dates are open and nothing else is pulling you to a particular month, May is the one to aim at. It gives you more sunshine than any other month in Edinburgh, sits among the three driest, and by mid-month there is enough daylight to put the castle in a morning and still have most of a day left over.
July and August are the busiest months in the city, and August is when the Old Town around the castle is most crowded: the Tattoo on the Esplanade and the Fringe filling every other venue. The castle stays fully open through all of it, but the slots go earlier. December is the darkest month, with just over seven hours of daylight in the middle of it and a 5pm close, which is short for a full day out and exactly why the batteries at dusk are a winter thing.
For the fewest people, January and February, when the city is quieter than at any other point in the year. The trade is the shortest days and the earliest close, though February hands back two hours of daylight on January for very little extra company. The month-by-month table below carries the figures for all twelve.
Castle tickets are sold for a dated time slot and they do sell out, most of all in summer, so the season you have picked is only half of it. This is the live calendar for the most-booked guided tour with entry included.
Put in the day you are going and the slot you are thinking of booking. Inside the next two weeks this reads the live forecast; beyond that it falls back to the long-term average for the month and says so on the card. It tells you what a date is like; the calendar above is what knows whether a slot is left on it.
Met Office average for September
A clear run at the castle
Nothing about this date works against you. You have 8.5 hours before closing, which is more than the two the castle asks for, so this is a date to take the slower tour on.
Beyond the forecast window, so this shows the Met Office long-term average for September. An average is not a forecast for your day.
Edinburgh Castle does not have one right month, because the four things people come for peak at different times. Pick the row you recognise yourself in.
May into early June
195 hours
of sunshine in May, the most of any month
May gives Edinburgh more sunshine than July or August, and sits with March and April among the three driest months. By mid-month there are more than sixteen hours of daylight, so the castle takes the morning and the city still has a full day in it afterwards.
Castle and Royal Mile walkNovember to April
8,800 seats
of temporary arena, off the Esplanade these months
The only stretch with a clear forecourt and no steel in front of the gatehouse. From late October to early February there is a second winter payoff: the castle shuts at 5pm and the sun goes down first, so the city lights come on while you are still on the batteries.
120-minute in-depth tourAugust
6–28 Aug
the 2027 run, on the Esplanade
There is no other month for it, and no other venue. If the Tattoo is why you are coming, August is not a compromise but the answer. Get the castle itself booked early: Historic Environment Scotland warns that tickets often sell out far in advance, and names the summer months as the worst of it.
Most-booked guided walkJanuary and February
53 vs 100
air passengers in January against July
Edinburgh Airport handled a little over half its July traffic in January, the widest gap in the year. The castle is the same castle in January as in July. The city around it is not, and neither is what a hotel room costs when no festival is on.
Guided history tourFor most attractions the season is the big decision and the time of day is a detail. Edinburgh Castle inverts that. Nothing inside it changes with the calendar, but the castle closes early, admits its last visitors an hour before that, and tells you outright how long you need. Put those three facts together and the slot you pick can halve or double your visit.
| Dates | Opens | Last entry | Closes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 April to 30 September | 9:30am | 5pm | 6pm |
| 1 October to 23 December | 9:30am | 4pm | 5pm |
| 24 December | 9:30am | 3pm | 4pm |
| 25 and 26 December | Closed | ||
| 27 to 31 December | 9:30am | 4pm | 5pm |
| 1 January | 11am | 4pm | 5pm |
| 2 January to 31 March | 9:30am | 4pm | 5pm |
Those are Historic Environment Scotland's own hours, and the same page tells visitors to set aside at least two hours for the main attractions. Put the two together and a rule falls out: the last entry slot gives you one hour in a place that officially needs two.
The 1pm gun is the other fixed point in the day. The One O'Clock Gun has been fired from the castle since 1861, every day except Sunday, and it collects an audience on the Argyle and Half Moon batteries in the quarter of an hour beforehand. It is one of the reasons people come, so this is not an argument for avoiding it. It is a reason to know that the walls above the city are at their busiest just before one o'clock and clear again by ten past.
Bad weather can close the castle at short notice. Historic Environment Scotland warns that adverse weather and other causes outside its control sometimes close sites, and publishes a running list. If the forecast is poor or you are travelling a long way, check the closures page on the morning you go.
Whatever season you land in, the castle is a morning and Edinburgh is a week. Walk the Royal Mile down to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, take the Old Town closes and Victoria Street, climb Arthur's Seat for the skyline, or follow the Harry Potter trail past Greyfriars Kirkyard. These are the Edinburgh tours and tickets that pair most easily with a castle morning.
Rainfall and visitor numbers frame a month. This is the part that decides what you will physically see.
The Esplanade is the broad parade ground in front of the gatehouse. Every photograph of Edinburgh Castle's frontage is taken from it. It is also the venue for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and for that a temporary arena seating about 8,800 people is assembled on it and then taken away again, every single year.
The Institution of Civil Engineers, describing the structure, puts the annual cycle like this: assembly begins in May, events are held in July and August, and dismantling ends in October. The build takes about 40 days and the disassembly about 37, moving more than 800 tonnes of steel across some 6,800 sections with around 1,700 crane lifts. The castle stays open through all of it.
So the castle's forecourt is occupied for roughly half the year, and clear for the other half. If what you want is the fortress rising off its rock with nothing in front of it, that is a November to April photograph. No weather table will tell you this, and for a lot of visitors it settles the month on its own.
From 1 October the castle closes at 5pm. In the depths of winter the sun is down well before that: 15:38 in the middle of December, 16:11 in the middle of January. Between about 25 October and 7 February, roughly 106 days, the sun sets while the castle is still open to visitors, so the lights of the New Town come on below you while you are still on the walls. In summer the castle has been shut for four hours by the time the sun goes down.
Winter is also the darkest part of the year by a long way. December averages 49 hours of sunshine for the whole month, against 195 in May. That takes nothing from the Honours of Scotland, the Great Hall, St Margaret's Chapel or the prisons of war, which are all indoors. It takes a good deal from the walk up the Royal Mile and the views out over the Firth of Forth.
April is the driest month in Edinburgh at 41 mm, and the Esplanade is still clear. May takes slightly more rain at 48 mm and is the sunniest month of the year, 25 hours ahead of July. Both months carry a real risk of cold: April's average daily high is 12.2 °C and May's 14.9 °C, and the wind off the North Sea at the top of Castle Rock takes several degrees off whatever the city is doing.
July is the warmest month at an average high of 19.3 °C and one of the wettest at 72 mm. August is a degree cooler and just as wet. It is also the month Edinburgh becomes a different city. In 2025 the Fringe issued 2,604,404 tickets across 53,942 performances of 3,893 shows at 301 venues, and the Tattoo drew more than 220,000 people to 24 performances on the Esplanade. Every one of those audiences walks past the top of the Royal Mile.
That is either the reason to come or the reason not to. Either way it is a choice and not a warning. What it is not is a weather argument: August gets less sunshine than May and the same rain as July.
September keeps summer's warmth into the evenings, with an average high of 16.9 °C, and the festivals finish at the end of August. The city does not empty as much as that implies, which the crowd figures further down set out. October is the wettest month of the year at 76 mm and the month the arena finally comes off the Esplanade. The clocks go back at the end of October, and from that weekend the castle's winter hours and the early sunsets arrive together.
| Month | Avg high | Sunshine | Rain | Daylight | Sunset | Visitors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 7.3 °C | 55 h | 65 mm | 7h 35m | 16:11 | 53 |
| February | 8.0 °C | 82 h | 53 mm | 9h 36m | 17:16 | 57 |
| March | 9.7 °C | 117 h | 48 mm | 11h 45m | 18:16 | 67 |
| April | 12.2 °C | 157 h | 41 mm | 14h 09m | 20:19 | 78 |
| May | 14.9 °C | 195 h | 48 mm | 16h 17m | 21:18 | 88 |
| June | 17.4 °C | 162 h | 66 mm | 17h 34m | 22:00 | 92 |
| July | 19.3 °C | 170 h | 72 mm | 17h 03m | 21:49 | 100 |
| August | 19.1 °C | 160 h | 72 mm | 15h 08m | 20:50 | 99 |
| September | 16.9 °C | 130 h | 55 mm | 12h 49m | 19:31 | 91 |
| October | 13.4 °C | 99 h | 76 mm | 10h 31m | 18:13 | 90 |
| November | 9.9 °C | 72 h | 65 mm | 8h 18m | 16:06 | 67 |
| December | 7.3 °C | 49 h | 67 mm | 7h 01m | 15:38 | 69 |
The rain column is the total depth of water that falls in an average month, measured in millimetres. It is not a daily rate and it is not a forecast. October's 76 mm against April's 41 mm means an average October delivers a bit under twice the rain of an average April. That is the whole of what it means.
It says nothing about how many days were wet, how long the rain lasted, or the odds of a dry afternoon on your date. A month with one big storm and a month with three weeks of drizzle can total exactly the same. Edinburgh takes 728 mm across the year, which is a moderate figure by British standards, and the practical effect at the castle is smaller still: the Honours of Scotland, the Great Hall and the prisons are all indoors, so rain mostly shortens the walking between them.
The sunshine column is more useful for planning a visit here, because it is what decides whether the view from the batteries is a view. May's 195 hours against December's 49 is the sharpest seasonal difference on the whole table.
Edinburgh Castle took 2,044,963 visitors in 2025, up three per cent on the year before, which made it the fifteenth most visited attraction in the United Kingdom and the busiest paid attraction in Scotland. Spread evenly that is about 5,600 people a day. It is not spread evenly.
The clearest figure for August comes from the contractor that assembles the Tattoo arena, which describes planning the build around a castle that stays open to around 12,000 visitors a day. That is roughly double the year-round daily average, on the days when the Esplanade is also a building site.
For the rest of the year there is no monthly count published for the castle itself, so the best available measure of pressure on the city is air traffic. Edinburgh Airport handled 949,376 terminal passengers in January 2025 and 1,781,758 in July, which is where the index in the table comes from.
That index carries one finding that changes how the shoulder months look. September sits at 91 and October at 90 against July's 100, so the drop after the festival is real but small. The busy season in Edinburgh is a broad plateau from May to October, not a summer spike, and the genuinely quiet part of the year is January to March. September is often described as the quiet alternative to summer; on this measure it is within ten per cent of the peak.
What makes August feel different is not the number of people in the city but where they are standing. The Fringe issued 2,604,404 tickets in 2025 and the Tattoo seats its audience on the castle's own forecourt, and both of those land on the Old Town and the top of the Royal Mile specifically.
Tap a question to open the answer.
The rule that matters most is arithmetic. Historic Environment Scotland asks visitors to allow at least two hours, and the last entry is one hour before the gates close, so a late slot leaves you half the time the castle says you need. Book by 4pm from April to September and by 3pm from October to March. The 9:30am slot is the only one with nobody admitted ahead of you, and the One O'Clock Gun at 1pm pulls a crowd onto the batteries every day except Sunday.
It depends what you came for, because nothing inside the castle is seasonal. May is Edinburgh's sunniest month at 195 hours against August's 160, so it is the month for weather and light. November to April is the only stretch when the Esplanade in front of the gate is clear of the temporary arena. From late October to early February the sun goes down before the 5pm winter close, so those are the months you can be on the batteries at dusk. August is the only month for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
Yes, apart from 25 and 26 December. From 1 April to 30 September it opens at 9:30am, takes its last entry at 5pm and closes at 6pm. From 1 October to 31 March it opens at 9:30am, takes its last entry at 4pm and closes at 5pm. It opens late, at 11am, on 1 January. Bad weather can close it at short notice, so check Historic Environment Scotland's closures page before a long journey.
Busy. It drew 2,044,963 visitors in 2025, which made it the fifteenth most visited attraction in the UK. Averaged across the year that is about 5,600 people a day, and the contractor who assembles the Tattoo arena describes the castle staying open to around 12,000 visitors a day while the August work goes on. The lightest months are January and February, when Edinburgh Airport handles a little over half its July traffic.
Edinburgh takes 728 mm of rain in an average year, spread fairly evenly across the twelve months. October is the wettest at 76 mm and April the driest at 41 mm. Those are totals for a whole month and not a daily rate, and they say nothing about how many days were wet. It matters less at the castle than at most attractions, because almost everything you came to see is under a roof.
Not closed, but not clear either. The Esplanade is the castle's forecourt and the venue for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and a temporary arena seating about 8,800 people is built on it every year. The Institution of Civil Engineers describes the annual cycle as assembly beginning in May, events in July and August, and dismantling finishing in October. The castle stays open throughout. If the castle's classic frontage is the photograph you came for, the clear months are roughly November to April.
August, on the Castle Esplanade. The 2027 run is 6 to 28 August, with performances of about 90 minutes. Recent years have drawn more than 220,000 spectators across 24 performances. Tattoo tickets are sold separately by the Tattoo and are not part of castle admission. Historic Environment Scotland warns that castle tickets often sell out far in advance over the summer months, so book both early.
Yes, and more so in summer. Historic Environment Scotland sells standard admission for a chosen date and time slot, and says plainly that once tickets sell out online there will be no further tickets available at the castle. Online adult admission is £23.50 against £26.00 at the gate, so booking ahead is cheaper as well as safer. A guided tour with entry included does the same job and adds someone to explain what you are looking at.
Whichever months you are working with, the castle is open and the interiors are the same. What you control is the slot. Book one at least two hours before closing, and the day is yours. Free cancellation up to 24 hours before on most tours.
