About FreeMuseumDay

What this site is

FreeMuseumDay answers one question well: when can you get into a museum, zoo or aquarium without paying — and what the catch is. It covers four things that usually live on four different corners of the internet: each institution's own free days and pay-what-you-wish hours, Bank of America's Museums on Us weekends, the reciprocal-membership networks printed on the back of your membership card (NARM, ASTC, AZA, ROAM), and the state-park passes many public libraries now lend like books.

There is no sign-up, nothing to install, and no account. The lookup tools run in your browser; we do not receive your searches.

Where the dates come from

Every free-day schedule on this site is read from the institution's own published page — the ticketing page, the discounts page, or the official press announcement — and every entry shows that source URL and the date we last checked it. Nothing is taken from a listicle, a local-news roundup or another aggregator, because those are exactly where stale dates propagate from.

• Museum, zoo and aquarium free days — each institution's own admissions or discounts page.
• Museums on Us — Bank of America's own program pages and press releases.
• Reciprocal membership rules — the official NARM, ASTC, AZA and ROAM program pages and rosters.
• Library state-park passes — each state's park agency or state library program page.

Where an institution publishes explicit dates (Illinois Resident Free Days, Denver's SCFD free days), we list those dates. Where it publishes a rule ("first full weekend of the month"), we compute the calendar from the rule and say so. Where we could not verify a policy from an official page, we leave it out — a missing museum is honest; an invented date sends a family to a closed ticket window.

Our rules

• Never invent a date or a price. An entry either carries a verified official source or it is not published.
• Show the source and the checked date on every entry, so you can confirm it yourself in one click.
• Say the catch out loud. Resident-only rules, advance-reservation requirements, excluded special exhibits and holiday suspensions appear next to the date, not in a footnote.
• Re-check on a schedule. Free-day calendars are published monthly or quarterly; the most-visited institutions on this site are re-checked against their own pages on a monthly pass, and every page shows when its data was last updated.
• Ads and affiliate links never sit above the answer. This ordering is enforced by an automated audit that runs on every deploy and blocks the release if it is violated.

Independence

FreeMuseumDay is an independent reference site. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any museum, zoo, aquarium, library system, state agency, bank or membership network named on this site. Program and institution names — including Museums on Us, NARM, ASTC and AZA — are trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to identify the programs being described. Free admission is offered by the institutions themselves; we just keep track of it.

Limits worth knowing

Free-day schedules change, sell out and get suspended — a museum can cancel a free evening for a private event, a zoo can switch a free day to timed reservations, and holiday weeks scramble everything. Treat this site as a well-maintained map, not a guarantee: the institution's own ticketing page is the final word, and we link it on every entry. If you find something out of date, tell us — corrections ship in the next data update.