Budapest nightlife prices

The four things that move the total

Almost nobody's night out costs what they budgeted, and it is nearly always one of four reasons:

• How many venues you enter. Some District VII venues charge on the door on busy nights and some do not, and it changes by night rather than by venue. Budget for the possibility rather than the average.
• What you drink. The spread between a beer and a cocktail is proportionally much wider here than the spread between a cheap bar and an expensive one. What you order matters more than where you order it.
• When you go. Peak summer weekends and the week around New Year are the expensive end. A weeknight outside the season is a materially different bill.
• How long you queue. Not a cash cost, but the one that quietly decides how many places you actually get into. An hour lost on a Kazinczy utca door on a Saturday is one venue you did not see.

Live venue prices in forints are researched and dated on what a night out in Budapest costs — that is the page to open if you want figures rather than factors. We deliberately do not restate them here, because a hub that quotes prices it does not maintain goes stale faster than the page it is summarising.

What the guided crawl costs

Our own price we can state exactly: €19.99 per person, currently discounted to €17.99, charged in euros. That covers three things, and it is worth being precise about them because they are the parts people misprice:

• A guided group that walks between the venues together, so nobody is navigating District VII at 1am.
• A welcome drink in every bar — not only the first. This is the line most often misread, including, until recently, on our own site.
• No-queue entry at every venue, including the club at the end.

The crawl runs 362 nights a year, closed only on 24 and 25 December and 1 January, so there is no peak-season surcharge to time around.

Is that worth it against doing it yourself

That depends entirely on how you were going to spend the evening anyway, which is why it gets its own page rather than a paragraph here: is a Budapest pub crawl worth it? works through the arithmetic honestly, including the cases where the answer is no.

If the number is what decides it for you, the crawl's own per-person price is on the booking page with the current discount applied. Groups booking together should look at a private pub crawl instead, which is priced differently.

Spending less

• Go outside peak. Pub crawl in Budapest in winter covers what the off-season is actually like — thinner crowds, indoor rooms, and a cheaper city generally.
• Walk it yourself. The self-guided ruin bar route is free, and it exists precisely so that the do-it-yourself option is a real one rather than a rhetorical one.
• Know which venues still exist before you set off. Half the famous ruin bars have closed permanently — see which ruin bars are still open. Two wasted taxi rides across town cost more than most of the decisions above.

Where to read next

• The neighbourhood all of this happens in — Budapest's party district.
• Planning the evening itself rather than the budget — Budapest nightlife.