NomadSwipeWhich day are museums closed? Monday, in 17 city decks
Museums are most often closed on Monday. Which day is safest? In the NomadSwipe app's stored hours for 369 museums and galleries in 17 city decks, 46% show Monday as closed, against 37% for Sunday and 24% for Tuesday. Thursday and Friday are lowest, at 7% each.
Closed share by weekday, all 17 city decks pooled
The table counts sights with stored weekly hours that are stored as closed on a given weekday. A museum or gallery is a card stored as Museum or ArtGallery. "Other sights" are the remaining stored sight categories (tourist attractions, parks, historic sites, gardens, theaters and concert halls, zoos, beaches and similar).
| Weekday | Museums and galleries (n = 369) | Other sights (n = 555) | All sights (n = 924) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 171 (46%) | 101 (18%) | 272 (29%) |
| Tuesday | 89 (24%) | 79 (14%) | 168 (18%) |
| Wednesday | 50 (14%) | 53 (10%) | 103 (11%) |
| Thursday | 25 (7%) | 33 (6%) | 58 (6%) |
| Friday | 26 (7%) | 11 (2%) | 37 (4%) |
| Saturday | 32 (9%) | 59 (11%) | 91 (10%) |
| Sunday | 136 (37%) | 116 (21%) | 252 (27%) |
Two days carry most of the closures. Monday and Sunday together account for 272 and 252 of the 924 sights, and for 171 and 136 of the 369 museums and galleries. Museums and galleries are closed more often than other sights on every weekday except Saturday. The gap is widest on Monday: 46% against 18%.
Monday and Tuesday by city (museums and galleries)
Cities are sorted by Monday share. Counts are museums and art galleries with stored hours in that deck, and a city with fewer than 10 of them is shown but not ranked.
| City deck | Museums and galleries with stored hours | Closed Monday | Closed Tuesday |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tallahassee | 16 | 12 (75%) | 4 (25%) |
| Mobile | 16 | 11 (69%) | 5 (31%) |
| New York City | 21 | 14 (67%) | 5 (24%) |
| Brussels | 18 | 11 (61%) | 4 (22%) |
| Minneapolis | 36 | 22 (61%) | 15 (42%) |
| Chicago | 46 | 26 (57%) | 15 (33%) |
| Tucson | 16 | 8 (50%) | 3 (19%) |
| Albuquerque | 32 | 15 (47%) | 12 (38%) |
| Yerevan | 29 | 13 (45%) | 1 (3%) |
| Brugge (Bruges) | 25 | 11 (44%) | 11 (44%) |
| Sofia | 23 | 9 (39%) | 0 (0%) |
| Athens | 28 | 10 (36%) | 3 (11%) |
| Sedona | 31 | 5 (16%) | 4 (13%) |
| Las Vegas | 20 | 3 (15%) | 4 (20%) |
| Abu Dhabi (under 10) | 9 | 0 of 9 | 0 of 9 |
| Buenos Aires (under 10) | 3 | 1 of 3 | 3 of 3 |
| Vienna | 0 | no museum or gallery has stored hours | none |
In 12 of the 14 ranked cities at least 36% of the stored museums and galleries are closed on Monday, and in Tallahassee, Mobile and New York City it is two thirds or more. Las Vegas (15%) and Sedona (16%) are the exceptions. Tuesday is its own pattern: it is as bad as Monday in Brugge (44% each), while Sofia stores no Tuesday closures among its 23 and Yerevan one among 29. Athens is the one ranked city where Sunday beats Monday: 12 of 28 stored as closed on Sunday against 10 on Monday. The data does not say why a city differs, so I do not guess at reasons.
What to do about closed days: 3 steps
- Check museums and galleries first, and park the rest. They are the stops most likely to be closed (46% on Monday against 18% for other sights), so give them the strongest days: Thursday and Friday are closed 7% of the time each, Wednesday 14%. The Tallahassee two-day plan tested stop by stop against weekday hours shows the result in a city with many Monday closures: day one works Tuesday to Thursday and day two Wednesday to Friday.
- Pick your trip days around the city's pattern, not a general rule. A Monday is a poor museum day in most of these decks, but not everywhere, so look at the city table above. An Athens plan with five museums, like the Athens two-day itinerary, and a Vienna plan built mostly from restaurants and bars, like the Vienna two-day itinerary, face different closed days, and the Vienna plan has stops stored as closed on Mondays or Sundays. For a short trip, a weekend city break checklist covers the other side: in five city decks, 6% of places with stored hours are closed on Saturday and 19% on Sunday.
- Test each day's stops against the weekday, then swap. Group your saved places by map position, check which weekdays each is open, and replace a closed stop with one from the same cluster instead of crossing town. Turning saved places into a day-by-day itinerary walks through that order; in the five plans it checked, 11 of 58 stops with stored hours were stored as closed on Monday and 6 on Tuesday. Confirm the final list on each place's own page before you go.
Questions about closed days
Are museums closed on Monday?
Often, but not everywhere. In the stored hours of 369 museums and art galleries in 17 city decks, 171 (46%) show Monday as closed. By city it ranges from 75% of the Tallahassee museums and galleries with stored hours (12 of 16) down to 15% in Las Vegas (3 of 20) and 16% in Sedona (5 of 31), so check the city, not just the day.
Are museums closed on Tuesday too?
Less often: 89 of the 369 museums and galleries (24%) show Tuesday as closed, about half the Monday share. The spread is wide. Brugge has 11 of 25 (44%) and Albuquerque 12 of 32 (38%) closed on Tuesday, while Sofia has 0 of 23 and Yerevan 1 of 29.
Which day of the week are attractions closed?
Across all 924 sights with stored hours, Monday (29%) and Sunday (27%) are the days most often stored as closed, followed by Tuesday (18%). Friday is the lowest at 4%. Sights other than museums and galleries are closed less often than museums on every weekday except Saturday: 18% on Monday and 21% on Sunday.
Can I trust these closed days for my own trip?
Use them as a planning prior, not as opening times. The hours are values stored in the NomadSwipe app's place data, last updated between 16 April and 12 May 2026 and read on 8 November 2026. Holidays and seasonal hours are not modelled, and a place with no stored hours is not treated as open. Confirm on the place's own page before you travel.
Build a trip around the open days
I built NomadSwipe to turn a city into a mapped shortlist: swipe real places, save the ones you like, and see them on one map. Then you can check each saved place against the day you plan to go. It is Android only.
Findings, method and sample
Sample and method. I queried the NomadSwipe app's place data on 8 November 2026 with read-only SQL. I joined cards to destinations, excluded the destination country "Custom", and deduplicated on the Google place ID across every row of a city, keeping the row that has stored hours (then the most recently updated). A sight is a card whose stored category is one of these CamelCase names: TouristAttraction, Museum, Park, ArtGallery, HistoricalSite, Garden, TheaterConcertHall, Zoo, Beach, Aquarium, ObservationPoint, Castle, Stadium and Church. Lowercase variants of the same names are a different scraped list and are not counted. I used no distance limit around the city centre, so a few cards on the edge of a deck are included, which is why the Tallahassee numbers here (20 of 40 sights closed Monday, 50%) differ from the 57% in the Tallahassee plan, which counted only an 8 km box.
How I read the hours. Each stored weekly-hours list holds seven text entries such as "Monday: Closed" or "Tuesday: 9 AM - 5 PM". Every list I found in the sight rows had either seven entries or none, and I matched days by name because some lists start on Saturday. A day counts as closed only when the text after the colon is exactly "Closed". Any other entry counts as open, including entries that cover all day and two Monday entries that read "Closed Memorial Day, hours may vary". A card with no list counts as no stored hours, never as open. I checked the parser against 10 Athens museum rows before using the result.
- Sample: 1,575 deduplicated sight cards in 17 city decks (the 20 decks that have a guide on this site, less 3 skipped below). 924 of them (59%) have stored weekly hours and are counted. 651 without stored hours are excluded. Of 469 museum and gallery cards, 369 have stored hours and 100 do not.
- Monday is the most-closed weekday: 29% of all 924 sights and 46% of 369 museums and galleries. Sunday is second (27% and 37%) and Friday the lowest overall (4%).
- Museums and galleries are closed more often than other sights on every weekday except Saturday (9% against 11%). The Monday gap is 46% against 18%, and the Tuesday gap 24% against 14%.
- By city, the Monday closed share of museums and galleries runs from 75% (Tallahassee, 12 of 16) to 15% (Las Vegas, 3 of 20) among the 14 cities with at least 10 such cards. 12 of the 14 are at 36% or higher.
- Cities skipped: Lisbon and Budapest have no card in the CamelCase sight categories, only lowercase category variants, so they have no counted sights. Chiang Mai has no deck in the data I read. Bruges is stored as "Brugge". Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires and Vienna are in the pooled numbers but have too few museums and galleries to rank. Every counted deck has at least 10 sights with stored hours (the smallest is Vienna with 11).
- The sight rows I counted were last updated between 16 April and 12 May 2026.
Limits. Stored hours are a snapshot scraped from place listings, not live opening times. Holidays and seasonal hours are not modelled, so a museum stored as open on Monday may be shut on a public holiday and one stored as closed may open in summer. A card with no stored hours is not "open", and I do not know whether the 41% of sights without hours differ from the rest. The decks are the places this app holds for 17 cities, not every museum in them, and they cover cities that have a guide here, so the pooled shares are not a global figure. City samples of 16 to 46 museums and galleries are small, so a gap of a few percentage points between two cities means little. Counts are cards, not merged venues, and the data shows when a place is stored as closed, not why.
Sources
- Place data: the NomadSwipe app's stored cards and destinations (categories, weekly hours and update dates as stored), read 8 November 2026. Sibling pages on this site for the Tallahassee, Athens, Vienna, weekend-break and saved-places figures quoted above. No third-party pages were used.