How much does it cost to enter Zhangjiajie National Forest Park?

Prices checked August 16, 2026 · official park sources

There are two gate tickets, and the difference is the shuttle bus

This is the part that older guides, and most of the pages currently ranking for Zhangjiajie ticket prices, get wrong.

Until the start of 2025, the park shuttle was inside the gate ticket. It is not any more. Admission and the shuttle bus are now two products: a cheaper ticket that lets you through the gate, and a combined ticket that also lets you ride the park buses. Both are in the table above.

Quoting the cheaper figure as “the price of a Zhangjiajie ticket” is technically accurate and practically misleading. The park’s sections are separated by mountain roads on which private vehicles are not permitted, and the shuttle is the only way across them. A visitor who buys entry alone and then discovers that Yuanjiajie is a road journey away from the gate has not saved money; they have bought a different, much smaller park.

There is no longer a high-season and low-season price. A single price applies year-round, which is a deliberate change rather than missing data on our side.

What the ticket does not cover

Everything that lifts you.

• The Bailong Elevator between the valley floor and Yuanjiajie.
• The Tianzi Mountain cable car.
• The Huangshizhai cable car and the Yangjiajie cable car.
• The Ten-Mile Gallery tram.

All of them are priced one way. The operator does not sell a discounted return, and multiplying a one-way fare by two is usually the wrong estimate anyway, because the standard routes are asymmetric: up by one lift, down by another, or down on foot.

Outside the gate ticket entirely: Huanglong Cave and Baofeng Lake, both inside the Wulingyuan area but sold separately, and the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon glass bridge, which is in another county and belongs to a different operator.

Who pays less

Reduced admission exists for younger children and teenagers, for full-time students up to bachelor level, for older visitors, for people with disabilities and for several military categories. Free admission exists for the youngest children and for visitors above a set age.

Two things are worth knowing before you plan around it:

• The age boundaries are not the round numbers most guides quote. They are set by a provincial pricing document, and they are neither round nor symmetric between the free and half-price bands. We deliberately do not paraphrase them here, because a visitor who arrives believing the rounded version pays at the counter for our convenience.
• A concession on admission is not a concession on transport. A child who enters free still pays the published fare for the Bailong Elevator and the cable cars, which have their own separate reduced rates.

Bring documentation. Concession categories are checked against ID, not asserted.

The insurance line

At the ticket counter you will be offered a small insurance add-on. It is voluntary and it is not included in the gate price. We list it as its own line in the table above because published “ticket prices” for Zhangjiajie frequently fold it in, producing a figure that is a few yuan higher than the actual regulated price and that then propagates from site to site.

The annual pass

An annual pass exists, and it costs surprisingly little more than the standard multi-day ticket. It is almost never the right purchase for an international visitor, and it is in the table for one reason: it explains why local prices and local advice sometimes look inconsistent with what you are quoted at the gate.

Where and how to buy

The official sales channel is a WeChat mini-programme run for the scenic area. There is no website version of it, and booking requires real-name registration: each ticket is tied to a specific passport or ID document.

What that means in practice:

1. Bring the passport you booked with. Registration is checked at the gate, and it is checked again on re-entry during the ticket’s validity.
2. A working WeChat Pay account makes the official channel straightforward. Without one, it ranges from awkward to impossible for a short-stay visitor.
3. Ticket offices at the gates still sell tickets. This is the fallback that always works, at the cost of standing in the queue that online booking exists to avoid.
4. Booking platforms and tour operators resell admission as part of their own packages, usually bundled with transport, a guide or the lifts. That is a convenience product, not a cheaper one — compare what is bundled before comparing prices.

Prices at the gate are regulated, so nobody is selling official admission below the published price. If a listing looks cheaper than the regulated fare, it is either a different product or a different scenic area.

Before you book

Two decisions belong upstream of the ticket, and both change how much you actually spend:

• Which gate you enter from. Entering at the northern Tianzishan gate reaches Tianzi Mountain, Yangjiajie and Yuanjiajie by shuttle alone, with no cable car fare and no elevator fare.
• How many days you will use. The multi-day validity is only worth paying for if your itinerary is built to use it.