What the Ticket Actually Costs

The mountain bus

Published for the 2026 season, and the only way up:

The lift is included. There is no separate admission to the building at the top; the fare covers the road, the tunnel and the lift.

Staying locally? The area’s guest card reduces the adult return to €31.80, but only at the ticket office — the discount cannot be applied to an online booking.

Cash is accepted, as are the common debit and credit cards. If you have read that the Kehlstein bus is card-only, that is a confusion with the bus from Salzburg, which genuinely is cash-only.

Your return is booked for you

Two hours after you go up. It is printed on the ticket, and it happens automatically rather than being something you choose.

Two hours is enough for the walk out to the cross above the house and something at the restaurant, and it is not enough to linger. There are rebooking terminals at the Kehlsteinhaus and at the bus turning circle if you want to change it.

The museum is included, and almost nobody says so

Your Kehlstein ticket admits you to the Dokumentation Obersalzberg free on the same day. That is printed on the fare sheet.

On its own the Dokumentation costs €4.50 for an adult, €3.50 with a guest card, and it is free for anyone under 18 — along with students, teachers, apprentices, people with a severe disability and their companion, and several other categories, on production of ID.

It is open daily 09:00 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:00, and closed on 1 November, 24, 25 and 31 December and 1 January, plus a maintenance period in mid-November. The bunker system is part of the permanent exhibition and carries no surcharge. The institution suggests allowing an hour and a half to two hours, and recommends the exhibition from age twelve, with a separate media-guide route for children from eight.

There is a public guided tour on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 11:00, ninety minutes, capped at twenty people, at €5 on top of admission — and it cannot be booked in advance.

So what does a day trip actually cost?

Take the headline price of any tour on this page, then check its exclusions.

The round trip from Salzburg includes the mountain bus and the lift. Its price is the price.

The other three do not. Add €34.70 per adult on the mountain. Two of them also list the Dokumentation admission separately — which, if you hold a Kehlstein ticket that day, you should not need to pay at all.

That is not a criticism of anyone: excluding a third-party mountain fare is normal practice and every one of them discloses it. It does mean the cheapest number on the shelf is not the cheapest day.

The season decides everything

The Kehlsteinstraße is closed all winter for avalanche risk. The 2026 season was published as roughly 7 May to 31 October, and the operator’s own term for those dates is provisional — the road opens and closes with the weather.

We are not going to print a hard closing date, because the official pages do not agree with each other: the operator’s timetable says 31 October, the tourist board’s FAQ says mid-to-late October, and its own hours calendar implies early November. Check directly for your dates.

Within the season, buses run about every twenty-five minutes, with the first ascent in the morning and the last descent in the late afternoon; times shorten from around the end of September.

If the weather closes it

The road can shut at short notice for storm, snowfall or rockfall, and the operator posts day-of information on its own channels. There is a live webcam, and a telephone number for the departure point which the English-language page asks you to call in bad weather.

There is no alternative route. When the buses are not running, the Kehlsteinstraße is closed to all traffic and to pedestrians. The Dokumentation Obersalzberg, however, stays open — and on a day when the summit is shut, it is the better half of the visit anyway.