The Ultimate Guide To Booking a Tour of the U.S. Capitol

The U.S. Capitol Building is the center of government in the U.S., an instantly recognizable symbol of democracy, and a byword for everything that various people think is right or wrong about America today. (And, yes, this is where that … unpleasantness … took place in 2021.) Since its beginnings, the U.S. Capitol Building has been a public space where citizens and curious visitors alike can revel in the aspirations — and transparency — of the arrhythmically beating heart of the great American experiment.

But how do you actually get to take a gander inside the U.S. Capitol Building?

Don’t worry: We’ve gotcha.

How to Book a Tour of the U.S. Capitol Building

The Capitol Visitor Center is open Monday through Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. It’s below the East Front plaza of the Capitol on First Street and East Capitol Street between Constitution and Independence avenues. The visitor center is the main entrance for the public — don’t try to walk through the front door of the Capitol Building, as it’s strictly off-limits, and you’ll likely be intercepted by security.

To see the U.S. Capitol beyond the Visitor Center, you must be on an official tour — you can’t just wander around on your own. Tours are available from 8:50 a.m. to 3:20 p.m., and the Capitol is closed on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, and Inauguration Day. You’re free to hang out in the Visitor Center all you want without a tour guide while it’s open, though.

You’re strongly advised to make an advance reservation for a Capitol visit, but if it’s a last-minute decision, you can try to see if there are any limited same-day tickets still available at the Capitol Visitor Center. The earlier you go, the better. You won’t get any same-day tickets if you arrive after 2:30 p.m.

You can either make an advance reservation yourself or get tickets through your U.S. representative or one of your U.S. senators, if you’d like to go old school or if you like to spend as little time on the internet as possible and you’d rather have them take care of the details and minimize you having to go through the Capitol scheduling calendar.

Remember: Tours of the U.S. Capitol are free!

Hot Tip:

It’s a good idea to reserve your tour weeks or months in advance.

Getting a Capitol Tour Through the Capitol Website

You can make Capitol tour reservations yourself by heading to the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center website. You need an account to use it, so if it’s your first time, fill in the necessary information and wait for the activation email to be sent to whatever email address you used.

Activating the account is almost instantaneous — the whole process should take less than 5 minutes.

Now that you’ve got your U.S. Capitol Visitor Center account squared away, you can navigate to the reservations page. It’s an interactive calendar that shows which tour times are available, which are fully booked, and which have a limited number of open spaces left.

Find the date you’d like to visit, find a tour time that works for you (there are tours every 10 minutes), and click through.

That takes you to the actual ticket reservation page, which helpfully shows you how many open tickets are remaining, reiterates the date and time you chose, and offers you a pulldown from which you select how many tickets you need.

You also have to agree to the fine print and agree or disagree with getting a questionnaire about your visit.

Finally, enter the code to verify that you’re a human being and hit Reserve Now to make your reservation.

There are tours available in Mandarin and Spanish, which you can reserve 3 days in advance of your visit by emailing CVCReservations@aoc.gov. There are only 50 slots for each of these tours, and there’s only 1 of each tour per day, starting at 8:40 a.m. You can get more details, including in both languages, on the foreign language tours page.

Getting a Capitol Tour Through Your Congressperson

One of the services that your congressmen or congresswomen, whether U.S. representatives or senators, should provide you is to give you access to the Capitol.

The exact layout and details may vary from congressperson to congressperson, but the basics should be the same. First, go to your representative or one of your senators’ official websites and look for the tab for U.S. Capitol or White House tours.

Once you’re on the tour request page, fill in the necessary details, including your name and contact information, the date and time you’d like a tour, how many tickets you need, and so on. They may ask for information you won’t necessarily need for the tour, such as the number of children and everyone else’s name. You don’t need identification at the U.S. Capitol to enter or for a tour.

Once you’ve submitted your request to your congressperson for a tour reservation, it can be a matter of days, weeks, or months before you hear back. You’ll either get an email confirming the date and time of your tour reservation or an email explaining that they were unable to fulfill your request.

How To Get to the Capitol

The U.S. Capitol doesn’t have a street address! Think of it as the point from which all U.S. streets originate, or at least as the political center of the American universe. If you’re somehow having trouble finding it on a map of Washington, D.C., look for where First Street meets East Capitol Street, between Constitution and Independence avenues at the end of the National Mall.

Hot Tip:

Walking around Washington, D.C., but can’t figure out where the Capitol Building is? It’s the one with the biggest dome on top. (And, no, that’s not the White House.)

The U.S. Capitol’s pretty obvious and easy to find. The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center isn’t as simple. It’s underground, so you need to head over to the East Front plaza of the building — on the opposite side of the main U.S. Capitol Building from the National Mall or across First Street NE from the U.S. Supreme Court — and go down a couple flights of stairs. The U.S. Capitol Building is big, so if you’re coming from most of the other Washington, D.C., attractions on the National Mall side, you need to factor that in to give yourself enough time to make it around.

You can enter the address for the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center into maps to get directions: First St SE, Washington, DC 20515.

Once you’re down the stairs on the right side of the Capitol Building, you may ask yourself: “Is this it?”

The entrance plaza to the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center is underwhelming and nondescript. The line to get in, however, can get long and usually snakes up the stairs to the west, and you have to wait out in the open under the sun or in the rain. Security lets people through a few at a time.

What You Can’t Bring Into the U.S. Capitol

Once you’re inside the front doors to the center, you have to go through security, including a metal detector and bag checks.

Here’s what you’re prohibited from bringing inside the U.S. Capitol:

• Liquids, including water, though you may bring empty water bottles to fill inside
• Food or beverages of any kind, including fruit and unopened packaged food
• Aerosol containers
• Nonaerosol spray (prescriptions for medical needs are permitted)
• Any pointed object, such as knitting needles and letter openers (pens and pencils are permitted)
• Any bag larger than 18 x 14 x 8.5 inches
• Electric stun guns, martial arts weapons
• Guns, replica guns, ammunition, and fireworks
• Knives of any size
• Mace and pepper spray
• Razors and box cutters

What To Do Inside the Visitors Center

The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center opened in late 2008 and sees 3 million visitors a year. It’s big, it’s busy, and it’s where you go to get into the U.S. Capitol proper. Once you’re inside the big space, head inside and join the lines for tours on the left.

If you’re early, or if you’ve already done a tour and want to hang around, you can move about freely in the visitor center, which has a decent number of attractions for you to explore on your own.

Exhibition Hall

The exhibition hall is a free-to-visit space that features interactive exhibits about the history of the Congress and the Capitol. Part of the hall is dedicated to demonstrating how the legislature works by guiding visitors through the process of how bills become laws. (No, none of the docents are despondent, talking scrolls.)

Other parts of the hall show how the Capitol was built up over time. A display shows you what it looked like when Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated a second time, while other displays take you on virtual tours of the rooms and halls of the Capitol you don’t get to see on the tour.

Some of it is hands-on, including the Democracy Lab, intended for children aged 8 to 14. Here, kids collaborate in educational activities meant to teach them about the Capitol and the democratic process within. (Adults must accompany the kids.)

Capitol Cafe

There is a public cafeteria in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center with a salad bar and food stations that will instantly be familiar to anyone who’s been to the biggest museums in Washington, D.C., or New York City (like the American Museum of Natural History). You get all the greatest hits of any major school field trip destination, including but not limited to burgers, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, pizza, a rotating “ethnic food” station, and crowd-pleasing but easily mass-produced desserts like Key lime pie and cookies.

Members of Congress have separate cafeterias, restaurants, and coffee shops in the wings of the Capitol that the public isn’t allowed in.

Gift Shops

There are 2 gift shops in the visitor center where you can buy Capitol- and D.C.-related knickknacks, including, yes, astronaut ice cream, just like in every other museum gift shop anywhere in the capital.

What To Expect From Your Tour

Tours begin every 10 minutes from morning until 3:20 p.m. You should try to get to the visitor center early, allowing for plenty of time to race down the Mall, if need be, and get through security. Don’t count on them being loosey-goosey with the schedule. We were 2 or 3 minutes late because there was a snag at security ahead of us, and we missed our tour. We only got to take a Capitol tour because the man at the ticketing desk took pity on us and gave us same-day tickets for the next tour.

All tours are led by professional tour guides — you’re handed a clunky listening device on a lanyard and a pair of headphones that are tuned to your specific guide’s frequency. That’s the only practical way you get to hear what they say, since the cavernous halls of the Capitol echo so loudly with the sounds of the thousands and thousands of people inside. You have to give the listening devices back when the tour’s over.

A typical tour takes you to the crypt, the rotunda, and the National Statuary Hall but never goes into the Senate and House galleries. You must arrange gallery visits by contacting your U.S. representative (for the House) or senator (for the Senate).

A Capitol tour usually lasts around an hour.

Crypt

The crypt doesn’t actually have any dead people in it. This relatively cozy space was built to be the permanent resting place of George Washington — who had already been buried for years and whose family, it turned out later, had no intention of digging him up. (Note to Capitol builders: Maybe check in with the widow before building a crypt for someone.)

It’s also where you get to see, close up, a number of the rotating statues that each state has sent to represent the important people in their histories. You may find some of these choices obvious, some of them baffling, and some of them infuriating. And there will be at least a few where you give your traveling companions the “Who the hell is that?” look.

Capitol Rotunda

The dome is in many ways more awe-inspiring on the inside than the outside. As the guides explain to visitors, the massive dome and the intricate details and artwork are the result of 2 centuries of painstaking work, setbacks, resets, and arguments — lots of arguments.

National Statuary Hall

The main display space for those state statues, the National Statuary Hall, looks both grandly majestic and like an extra set from the director’s cut of “Caligula.” Your guide will have more information about the statues in the hall during your visit — probably with some sort of quiz — but this, apparently, is a busy space for congresspeople to go whizzing by as they rush to make a vote. (Yes, even that one.) In fact, the outer door to the current speaker of the House and third line to the presidency, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is so close that it looks like it could be National Statuary Hall’s cloakroom.

Want a Specialty Tour?

Was the hour-long vanilla tour not enough to quench your congressional thirst? Go to the specialty tours page to see when and where to join deeper-dive tours on specific subjects (women’s rights, Indigenous peoples, the grounds, etc.).

Final Thoughts

The U.S. Capitol is one of the most instantly recognizable buildings in the world (even if so many people get it mixed up with the White House) and is a symbol of American democracy, America’s foibles, and everything that’s both right and wrong with the country. Its history, both as a building and an institution, is remarkable, and taking a tour of it should be on the bucket list of anyone interested in American history, politics, or astronaut ice cream.