Is Gellert Baths Open? No, and Nobody Ranking for This Will Tell You

You have probably just come from a page selling you a ticket. We pulled the first fifteen Google results for this search on 29 September 2026, and not one of them mentions that the bath is shut. The city's own tourist board ranks third with a page that describes the pools in the present tense. Two booking platforms run pages headed "Gellert Baths tickets and tours". Blog posts from 2016, 2018 and 2021 fill the rest.

Is Gellert Baths open? No

The bath's own website carries the same sentence on the home page and again on the opening-hours page, which is the page you would land on if you went looking for times:

A fürdő 2025. október 1-től zárva tart. Várható nyitás 2028-ban.

That is: the bath is closed from 1 October 2025, expected opening in 2028. It is dated nowhere, signed by nobody, and it is still the most authoritative statement in existence, because it comes from Budapest Gyógyfürdői és Hévizei Zrt, the city company that runs the bath. Read on 29 September 2026.

One detail matters more than it should. The site has an EN toggle in the header. It redirects to the Hungarian page. An English speaker who does the right thing, ignores the blogs and goes to the official source, arrives at a notice they cannot read, on a site whose navigation is entirely in Hungarian. The information is published. It is just not published in a language the people who need it can use.

Why every page you just clicked says otherwise

This is worth spelling out, because the volume of wrong information here is unusual even by travel-guide standards. These are the first fifteen organic results for gellert baths budapest in the United States on 29 September 2026, and the closure count is zero:

One platform has quietly done the right thing. Viator no longer lists a single Gellert product. Search its catalogue for a Gellert bath ticket and you get Szechenyi, Lukacs, Palatinus, Paskal and Csillaghegy back instead. That is a delisting, not an accident, and it is the clearest signal in the whole market that the bath is not sellable.

None of this means the pages still up are scams. It means nobody is paid to notice when a landmark shuts, and a page that ranked for eight years keeps ranking for a while after the thing it describes stops existing.

What exactly is shut

All of it. The name on the door is Gellért Gyógyfürdő és Uszoda, the medicinal bath and the swimming pool, and the notice covers the whole address at Kelenhegyi út 2. There is no reduced service, no outdoor-pools-only summer arrangement and no part of the complex you can talk your way into.

The hotel that shares the building is shut as well, and this catches out the people who booked a room specifically for bath access. Danubius Hotels, which ran it, published a farewell notice that is still on their site: Danubius Hotel Gellért closed on 1 December and will no longer be operated by Danubius Hotels. The notice gives no year, and the rest of the same page still describes the hotel in the present tense, so we quote it as it stands rather than date it ourselves. What happens to the building next has not been announced by anyone whose statement we could verify, so we are not going to tell you.

What is still open, and worth an hour if you came all this way, is everything above and around it: the Cave Church and the climb up Gellert Hill start fifty metres from the bath's front door, and the Citadella at the top reopened after its own long restoration.

Where to go instead, compared

The right substitute depends on which part of Gellert you were actually booking. People say "Gellert" and mean four different things: the architecture, the outdoor pools, a cheap soak, or the wave pool. Only three of those have a good answer.

The under-14 rule in that last line is the thing to read twice if you are travelling with a family. Szechenyi, Rudas, Lukacs and Dandar have all refused under-14s since 1 August 2025, so three of the four substitutes are closed to your children before you get to the price. Palatinus is not: its own tariff has a line for children aged 3 to 14 and two family tickets that require at least one.

Szechenyi, for the grand setting

If what you wanted from Gellert was the feeling of swimming inside a palace, Szechenyi is the nearest thing left. It is Neo-Baroque rather than Art Nouveau, mustard yellow rather than green and gold, and considerably bigger: three large outdoor pools and fifteen indoor ones, the largest medicinal bath in Europe. It is also the busiest bath in the city by a wide margin, which was precisely what people liked about Gellert not being.

Adult entry with a locker is 13,200 HUF Monday to Thursday, 14,800 from Friday to Sunday and 15,800 on peak dates, bought at the desk or from the bath's own shop. There is a cheaper Good Morning ticket at 10,500 HUF if you are through the door by 9:00, which is also when the outdoor pools are at their best. Two dates to avoid this autumn, both published by the bath: it is closed all day on 6 October 2026 and closes at 14:00 on 23 October.

Most reviewed

Private Entrance to Szechenyi Spa, with Optional Massage

★★★★☆3.7 · 2,354 reviews

Prepaid entry through a separate door, which on a Saturday in high season is worth real money. Note the gap: the bath's own desk price is 13,200 HUF, about 36 euros, so you are paying roughly 19 euros for the queue and free cancellation. On a quiet weekday morning, buy at the desk instead.

from €55

per adult · free cancellation

Check availability→

Hours, the queue, the chessboards and everything that catches first-timers out are in our full guide to Szechenyi.

Rudas, for the Danube and the Ottoman bath

Rudas is four hundred metres up the riverbank from Gellert, close enough that you can walk between them in six minutes, and it is the substitute nobody suggests because the architecture is a different century entirely: a 16th-century Ottoman bath under a domed octagonal pool, with a modern rooftop pool looking across the Danube at the Pest skyline.

A day ticket covering all zones is 12,000 HUF Monday to Thursday, 15,000 Friday to Sunday and 16,000 on holidays. There is a cheaper route if you only want the historic part: a Turkish-bath-only ticket at 8,000 HUF, valid on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays until 10:45.

The catch, and it is a real one: the Ottoman bath is women only on Tuesdays and men only on Wednesdays, all day, with no mixed session on either. The wellness pools, the swimming pool and the sauna world stay mixed every day, so a single-sex day changes your visit rather than cancelling it. The full timetable is in our complete guide to Rudas.

Lukacs, for half the money

Lukacs is the one to take if the appeal of Gellert was a long unhurried soak rather than a photograph. It sits on the Buda side near Margaret Bridge, it is built around several pools at different temperatures instead of one showpiece hall, and the crowd is day-pass regulars rather than tour groups.

It is also, by a distance, the cheapest of the three proper thermal baths: 7,000 HUF on weekdays and 8,000 at weekends, roughly half Szechenyi. Two tickets are worth knowing about and go unmentioned everywhere else. An afternoon ticket valid for the last two hours before closing is 3,800 HUF on weekdays, and the sauna world is a separate 1,300 HUF, opening at 14:00 on weekdays and all day at weekends. Hours are 7:00 to 19:00, and 7:00 to 22:00 on Tuesdays.

Two things are currently out of service and the bath says so on its own page: the plunge pool in the wellness area, for technical reasons, and the private bathtub and accessible changing facilities, for renovation work. Buses 9 and 109, trams 4, 6, 17 and 19, or the HÉV towards Szentendre to Margit híd.

Full-day admission

Full-Day Admission to Budapest Lukacs Thermal Bath

★★★★☆3.6 · 38 reviews

Prepaid full-day entry. Thirty-eight reviews against Szechenyi's two thousand, which tells you how much less touristy this bath is. The desk price is 7,000 HUF on a weekday, about 19 euros, so this is a convenience purchase rather than a saving: worth it if you want free cancellation, not if you are simply walking in.

from €33

per adult · free cancellation

Check availability→

The wave pool nobody points you to

Every list of Gellert alternatives sends you to Szechenyi or Rudas. Neither of them has a wave pool, and the wave pool is the thing a lot of people were coming for: Gellert installed its wave-generating mechanism in 1927, one of the first anywhere, and it is the single feature the substitutes are missing.

There is a working one, on Margaret Island. Palatinus lists its wave pool as in service, heated to 28 degrees, on the same operator page that tells you which of its pools are shut, so it is a live status rather than a brochure claim. Adult entry is 3,800 HUF on weekdays and 4,200 at weekends, about ten euros, and a two-hour ticket is 2,600 HUF.

The thing to correct, including on our own thermal baths page, which said otherwise until today: Palatinus is not a summer-only lido. The operator's opening-hours page states that the bath is open every day of the year, 9:00 to 19:00, and publishes a separate winter tariff that took effect on 14 September 2026. One pool, the round outdoor one, closes from 4 October. The wave pool is not that pool.

Do not buy this one online. The platform product costs around 27 euros, close to triple the desk price, and it is sold as skip-the-line for a bath that does not have the queues that make skipping worth paying for. Walk up and pay the 3,800. Getting there, and what else is on the island, is in our guide to Margaret Island.

What nothing in Budapest replaces

It would be easy to end the comparison table and pretend the problem is solved. It is not. Gellert was the only Art Nouveau bath in Budapest, and the substitutes are Neo-Baroque, Ottoman and municipal. Szechenyi is grander and Rudas is older, and neither of them has the carved columns, the Zsolnay ceramics or the glass roof over the thermal hall. If the photographs are why you were going, you are not getting a version of that until 2028.

The honest advice, if the building itself was the trip: go up the hill instead. The exterior is still there, the facade is one of the best things on that stretch of the river, and the view from the Citadella above it is free. Then book a bath for the water rather than the ceiling, and pick on price.

What happens in 2028

The published position is one word long: 2028. There is no month, no phased reopening and no interim milestone that we could find from the operator, and we are not going to fill that gap with a figure from a news article we cannot check against the company that owns the building.

What can reasonably be said: a three-year restoration of a listed 1918 interior is not the kind of project that finishes early, and 2028 is best read as the earliest plausible date rather than a commitment. If you are planning a trip for 2028, plan it without the bath and treat a reopening as a bonus.

We check this page against gellertfurdo.hu rather than against other guides, and we will change the date here when the operator changes it there, not when a press release says something more optimistic.

Frequently asked questions

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