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Eiffel Tower Paris Tours › Inside the Eiffel Tower: A Floor-by-Floor Guide to Every LevelUpdated 2026-09-09

Inside the Eiffel Tower: A Floor-by-Floor Guide to Every Level

Hours, prices and access verified by the Eiffel Tower Paris Tours team — last checked 2026-09-09

An aerial view of the Eiffel Tower with the Seine and the rooftops of Paris

The short answer. Four levels. The esplanade and gardens underneath are free. The first floor at 57 metres has the glass floor and is reached by every ticket. The second at 115 metres has the views and a Michelin star. The top at 276 metres has Gustave Eiffel’s reconstructed office, the panoramic maps and a champagne bar — and the second queue you have to stand in to get there.

People buy a height and then discover a building. There are four distinct levels here, they do different things, and the one almost everybody skips is the one with the most on it. Which fare reaches which level is set out with the guided tours of the Eiffel Tower, and the fares that put the top floor in the price are the Eiffel Tower summit tours.

The esplanade: free, and worth an hour

Under the piers, between the four feet, is open ground. You clear a security check to get onto it and then pay nobody. The Belle Époque gardens are on the way in, there are buffets and shops on the esplanade itself, and standing directly beneath 10,100 tons of iron is a different experience from looking at it across the river.

A great many people come only this far and it is a perfectly good evening. There is no free entry to the Eiffel Tower itself — every floor is ticketed — but the ground under it costs nothing.

The first floor, 57 metres: the one nobody stops on

This is the level that rewards a stop and almost never gets one, because a lift ticket carries you straight past it on the way up.

  • The glass floor, which is exactly as unsettling as you want it to be.
  • An outdoor discovery walkway along the exterior passageway, telling the tower’s own story.
  • Smartphone experiences that put Gustave Eiffel in front of you when you scan their codes — look for him near the transparent guardrail and in the outdoor walkways.
  • Madame Brasserie, under Michelin-starred chef Thierry Marx.
  • The Pavillon Ferrié shop, and a seasonal terrace in summer.

Every ticket reaches it. A stairs ticket takes you through on the way up or down; a lift ticket takes you through on the way down. Nobody pays extra. The restaurants are on the restaurants page.

The second floor, 115 metres: where the views are

This is the floor to plan around, and the tower’s own pages are unusually specific about why. From here you pick out the Louvre, the Grand Palais, the bends of the Seine, Montmartre, Invalides and Notre-Dame. High enough for the whole city, low enough to tell one building from another.

It runs to 4,692 square feet across two levels. Le Jules Verne is up here at 125 metres, one Michelin star under Frédéric Anton, in three successive rooms facing the Champ-de-Mars, the Quai Branly and the Trocadéro. So is the Macaron Bar, with two recipes Pierre Hermé made for the tower and nowhere else. On the lower level, Champ-de-Mars side, a second smartphone experience runs when you stand about a metre and a half back from the railings.

It is also the last stop before the top, and that is where the queue is.

The top, 276 metres

Two glass-walled lifts climb the last stretch from the second floor. The top has two levels, one open to the sky and one enclosed, and 820 square feet of floor between them — the smallest platform on the tower and the one people wait longest for.

Four things are up there and three of them are easy to walk past:

  • Gustave Eiffel’s office, restored, with wax figures of Eiffel, his daughter Claire and Thomas Edison, and the gramophone Edison gave him.
  • The panoramic maps, which place you and then give the direction, distance and height of monuments around the world, with a reference line for this tower.
  • A 1:50 model of the 1889 summit, in the original red-brown, showing what the top was first meant to look like.
  • The champagne bar, built into the structure, 11am to 10.30pm and to midnight in July and August.

Take a layer. The monument’s own line is that it is always windy on the third floor, and it means it.

The top closes, and not rarely. High wind, severe weather and sometimes sheer capacity shut it, on the operators’ own judgement on the day. Your second-floor access is unaffected and most operators refund the summit portion of the fare, but the day changes. If the top is the whole reason for the trip, check the month on the weather page before you fix a date, and read the cancellation line on your own card.

What each level actually costs

LevelHeightFloor areaReached by
Esplanade and gardensGround—Free, after the security check
First floor187 ft / 57 m14,485 sq ftEvery ticket
Second floor377 ft / 115 m4,692 sq ft€14.80 stairs, €23.50 lift
The top906 ft / 276 m820 sq ft€28.00 or €36.70

Note how the floor area collapses as you climb. The first floor is nearly eighteen times the size of the top, which is most of the explanation for why the queues behave the way they do.

The lifts, and why there are two queues

Five lifts run from the esplanade to the second floor. Two pairs of duolifts run from the second floor to the top. Those are separate systems with separate capacity, which is why booking the top means standing in line twice — once on the ground and once at 115 metres.

Travellers who have done it in the evening say the second queue is the longer of the two around sunset. It is nothing an operator can fix, and it is worth knowing before you choose your slot. The weather page has the sunset times by month.

A route that works

  1. Clear the first security check and walk in through the gardens.
  2. Green kiosk for the lift, blue for the stairs.
  3. If you booked the top, go straight up — the tower’s own rule on some tickets is that the summit comes first.
  4. Come back down to the second floor and spend the time there, because that is where the view resolves.
  5. Take the stairs down from the second to the first, and actually stop.
  6. Walk out through the gardens rather than straight to the metro.

The full ticket-by-ticket comparison sits on the second floor and summit page, and the security and timing detail on what to expect.

What you will actually remember

Ask people afterwards and the answers cluster, and almost none of them are the height. The glass floor comes up first, from adults as often as children. Then the moment on the second floor when a guide points and a grey smudge resolves into the Sacré-Cœur. Then, from anyone who timed it right, the five minutes on the hour when the whole structure starts to sparkle around them.

The office at the top does surprisingly well too. It is a small room with three wax figures in it, and standing at 276 metres looking at Gustave Eiffel entertaining Thomas Edison in the space he built for himself is a stranger experience than the panorama outside the window. If you are going up that far, do not walk past it — and give yourself the ten minutes the panoramic maps deserve as well.

Want the top rather than the second floor? Some of the tours listed here include it outright instead of leaving it as a checkout option, and these are they. The rest are on Eiffel Tower Paris Tours.

Tours that reach the top floor