Paris on a budget
Budget €50/day ($59) gets you a hostel dorm in the 10th or 11th, boulangerie meals, and carnet Métro tickets. Midrange runs €150 ($176) with a three-star near Bastille and sit-down dinners. The hidden killer is museum stacking — the Louvre alone is €22, and three paid museums in one day adds €55 to your budget.
Questions budget travelers ask about Paris
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Cost per day
Budget €50/day ($59) gets you a hostel dorm in the 10th or 11th, boulangerie meals, and carnet Métro tickets. Midrange runs €150 ($176) with a three-star near Bastille and sit-down dinners. The hidden killer is museum stacking — the Louvre alone is €22, and three paid museums in one day adds €55 to your budget.
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What to avoid
Skip the restaurants on Rue de la Huchette — laminated menus, microwaved food, men pulling you inside. Avoid Champs-Élysées dining and shopping; it's chain stores at double the price. Watch for the gold ring scam near the Louvre and bracelet-tying at Sacré-Cœur. Métro Line 1 is pickpocket territory during rush hours — bags zipped, phone in front pocket.
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Getting around
The Métro does the heavy lifting. Sixteen lines reach every neighborhood worth visiting, and a Navigo Easy card loaded with t+ tickets at €2.15 each keeps you moving without fumbling for cash. Walk between sights in the same arrondissement — Paris is only about 10 km across. Uber works but costs four times the fare.
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Airport to city
From Charles de Gaulle (CDG), take the RER B train — roughly €11.80 ($14), 35 minutes to Châtelet-Les Halles, runs 4:50am to midnight. After hours, taxis have a fixed €55 fare to the Right Bank, €62 to the Left Bank — set by prefectural decree, non-negotiable. From Orly, the Orlybus to Denfert-Rochereau runs €11.50, 30 minutes.
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Food culture
Paris eats on a strict schedule — coffee and a croissant by 8, a proper sit-down lunch from noon to 2, and dinner never before 8pm. The city runs on butter, bread crust, and seasonal produce treated with near-religious seriousness. Skip the Champs-Élysées and eat where the waiters are indifferent to everyone equally.
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Curated for budget travelers
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Best hostels
Paris's hostel inventory clusters in two distinct geographies that the rest of this list keeps separating: the inner arrondissements where night-bus routes still run after the metro closes, and the outer-ring or RER-served communes where the trade-off is a quieter night and a cheaper bed in exchange for a 25-40 minute commute to the Seine. Inside the périphérique, the 10th (Canal Saint-Martin), 4th (Marais), and 18th (Montmartre) carry the densest hostel inventory because they sit on top of Gare du Nord, Châtelet-Les Halles, and Pigalle interchanges — the three points where a traveller arriving by Eurostar, TGV, or RER B can drop a backpack within twenty minutes of stepping off the platform. The 12th, 15th, and Batignolles are the residential-Paris alternative: slightly cheaper, far quieter, and walkable to a real boulangerie instead of a souvenir kiosk. Outside the périphérique, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Roissy-en-France, and Villepinte are functional rather than scenic — Issy for a Métro 12 commute to Concorde, Roissy and Villepinte for early CDG flights or Parc des Expositions trade shows. Pick an inner-ring area when you want to walk to dinner; pick the outer ring when your itinerary already has you spending most days outside central Paris.
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Best free attractions
Paris hands the visitor more for free than almost any city its size — public squares and gardens that the city keeps open at no charge, two large woods at its edges, and a public-space tradition that treats the park bench as civic infrastructure. The list below is twelve of them: six squares and six green spaces, each one verified on Wikidata, each one open to anyone who walks through. The Tuileries and the Jardin du Luxembourg are already on most visitors' mental maps. Parc Monceau, the Bois de Vincennes, and place des Vosges reward the small detour it takes to reach them. The list is for a traveller who would rather spend an afternoon on a bench in a quieter quarter than queue for one more ticketed monument, and for a Parisian who has not yet bothered to walk the city's own edges.
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