Antelope Canyon Tours: Upper vs Lower, Prices & Booking

You can’t walk into Antelope Canyon. All four slot canyons on this piece of Navajo Nation land outside Page, Arizona - Upper Antelope, Lower Antelope, Canyon X and Cardiac - are open only to booked tours led by an authorized Navajo guide, and the $15 park permit is either built into the price or added at checkout. When we priced one adult on the operators’ own booking pages on September 17, 2026, a standard late-September tour came to $80.50 all in at both Lower Antelope companies, $68.99 for the Canyon X hike and $98.26 to $158.27 at the four Upper Antelope operators we priced. Book weeks ahead for any date between April and September.

What trips people up is that Antelope Canyon looks like a national park and isn’t one. It sits on tribal land, so an America the Beautiful pass buys nothing at the gate, the federal reservation system doesn’t apply, and there’s no self-guided hour at any time of year. The real choice is the canyon, the operator and the time slot.

Upper, Lower or Canyon X: which one to book

The canyons are minutes apart on the same wash, cut into the same Navajo sandstone, and they photograph almost identically on Instagram. On the ground they’re different walks with different bodies required.

Upper Antelope Canyon

This is the famous one, and the shape explains why. Upper is wide at the floor and pinched at the top, which is exactly the geometry that lets a midday sun drop a solid column of light onto the sand. You leave your car at the operator’s office in Page, ride out in a tour truck and walk in on a flat canyon floor with no ladders. The way back is harder than it used to be: the Upper tours we checked now run one way and finish with a climb outside the canyon. Antelope Canyon Tours describes a 200 ft rise with stairs that has to be done in 20 minutes, and Antelope Canyon Navajo Tours says you descend 150 stairs to get back to the trucks.

It’s also the busiest, and every Upper operator we priced came out above both Lower Antelope companies. Antelope Canyon Tours, the operator at 22 South Lake Powell Boulevard, runs its sightseeing tour for one hour and 45 minutes door to door, all ages welcome. Its homepage still said “from $85” on September 17, 2026, while its booking calendar charged $75 for the 4:00 p.m. tour, $95 at 1:40 p.m. and $120 at 11:20 a.m. in late September, before the $15 park fee and card and booking fees. Antelope Slot Canyon Tours runs 90 minutes with a minimum age of six. Don’t budget off a homepage “from” figure; open the calendar for your date and time slot.

Lower Antelope Canyon

Lower is the mirror image: narrow at the floor, opening up above you. That means you go down into it, on bolted metal stairways and steep ladders, and you spend the tour looking up through corkscrew walls rather than out along a corridor. It rewards anyone who likes the sandstone shapes more than the light show.

Ken’s Tours prices its General Tour at $80.50 per person with the $15 permit, tax and booking fee already inside, for a 50 to 60 minute walk, and Dixie’s charges the same $80.50 all in for anyone aged 4 and up. Dixie’s runs an hour in the canyon and asks you to check in 45 minutes early, so budget an hour and a half on site either way. Both operators are blunt about the stairs, and Ken’s asks you to flag mobility concerns when you book. If steep metal steps in a confined space aren’t your thing, Upper keeps its stairs outside the canyon rather than inside it, but it still has them.

Antelope Canyon X and Cardiac Canyon

Taadidiin Tours is the only authorized operator for these two, and its Canyon X hike was the cheapest tour we found across the eight operators we checked. The 90 minute hike costs $47 for adults and $37 for anyone under 18, all ages welcome, plus the $15 permit from age 8, and one adult came to $68.99 at checkout. That buys a canyon that sees a fraction of the traffic. You get in and out down a 200 foot staircase built from railroad ties, which rules it out for anyone using a wheelchair or a walker. Cardiac Canyon is the long version at $192 plus the permit for four hours, ages 8 and up, and it runs only with at least two people booked; a solo traveler can join a date that already has two.

There’s one more reason to care about Canyon X. Navajo Nation Parks has stopped issuing photography and filming permits for Upper and Lower because of visitor numbers, and the regular tours we checked there are handheld only: Antelope Canyon Tours bans tripods and monopods on its sightseeing tour, and Ken’s bans tripods on every tour it runs. If you’ve packed a tripod, Taadidiin still sells a three hour photography tour at Canyon X for $142 plus the permit, ages eight and up, where a camera bag and a tripod are allowed, and a six hour Cardiac Canyon photography tour at $342 plus the permit, with the same two-person minimum. Inside Upper Antelope, the one tripod booking we found is after dark: Adventurous Antelope Canyon Tours lists a three hour night photography tour that starts an hour after sunset, for photographers 21 and over, at $285 before the $15 permit, tax and fees.

What a tour actually costs

Operators show their prices in two ways, which is why a headline fare doesn’t tell you much. Ken’s and Dixie’s print one figure with the permit, tax and fees inside. The other operators we priced show the tour fare and add the $15 permit at checkout, along with processing and booking fees and, at Adventurous, a 6% Navajo Nation tax and a 5% surcharge. On September 17, 2026 we priced one adult on each operator’s own booking page for a late-September tour, going through to the checkout total wherever the fare left something out, with optional add-ons unticked, and stopped before paying:

Antelope Canyon Navajo Tours, the fifth Upper operator we checked, publishes a flat price instead: $85 plus the $15 permit, or $105 plus the permit for a late-morning tour, with the processing fee and tax on top. Its pricing note names an 11:40 tour, but the schedule on the same page lists 8:20 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 3:20 p.m., so ask which slot carries the higher price before you book.

Tse Bighanilini, Antelope Slot Canyon Tours and Adventurous pre-tick a refund or trip protection add-on in the cart, $10 a person at each, and the totals above leave it out. Without it, Antelope Slot Canyon Tours treats every sale as final, while Tse Bighanilini and Adventurous keep part of the fare whenever you cancel and all of it inside 24 hours. Bring the right card, too: Antelope Canyon Tours wants the physical card you booked with and your ID at check-in and doesn’t accept virtual cards, and Antelope Slot Canyon Tours wants the cardholder there with a photo ID in the name on the card.

Two things move these numbers. The first is the time slot: the late-morning tours, when the beams show up, cost more at Tse Bighanilini, Antelope Canyon Tours and Antelope Canyon Navajo Tours, while the first or last tour of the day can be the cheap one: Antelope Slot Canyon Tours charges $90 at 7:40 a.m., and Antelope Canyon Tours $75 at 4:00 p.m. The second is the date, and here the operators split. A week later, on October 1, Tse Bighanilini’s late-morning tour had dropped from $120 to $80 and Antelope Canyon Tours’ 1:40 p.m. tour from $95 to $90, while Adventurous, Taadidiin and Ken’s charged the same as in September. Antelope Canyon Tours runs its 4:00 p.m. tour only from April through September and says it discounts in late fall and winter. Treat the table as one week’s snapshot, and don’t book off it: price your own date on the operator’s calendar.

Above the standard tours sit the longer formats: Ken’s Deluxe Tour, 75 to 90 minutes in the canyon plus a heritage-site visit and a meal, at $173.63 all in, and Taadidiin’s Canyon X photography tour at $142 and Cardiac Canyon hike at $192, both plus the permit.

Tours sold out of Las Vegas or Flagstaff bundle the driving, and that’s the honest trade: Page is four and a half to five hours from the Las Vegas Strip each way, so a Vegas day tour is a fourteen hour day for roughly an hour underground. If you’re already driving the Southwest loop, book the canyon direct and keep the day.

The $15 permit, and how to pay it only once

Navajo Nation Parks charges $15 per person, per location, per day for the Lake Powell tribal park, and that money is separate from the tour fare. Ken’s and Dixie’s build it into their $80.50. The other operators we priced add it as its own line when you book online: Antelope Canyon Tours charges it from age 8, Taadidiin calls it a hiking permit, and Antelope Canyon Navajo Tours prints it next to its $85 fare.

The part almost nobody mentions: that permit is a same-day document and it travels between companies. Taadidiin tells guests who bought a permit elsewhere to bring the receipt to check-in. Dixie’s refunds its $15 to the card on file once it has verified that you visited Upper Antelope, Canyon X or Waterhole Canyon the same business day. Antelope Canyon Tours says a refund could be available, but only on the day and only against a printed receipt with a matching date; an email confirmation doesn’t count. Do two canyons in one day and you should pay $15, not $30, but nothing happens automatically: carry the first receipt on paper and ask at the second check-in.

When to go, and how the light beams work

The beams in Upper Antelope run roughly from late March to early October, in a window around 11:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., and only on a clear day. June through August is the strongest stretch and also the most competitive: midday slots from April onward go first, often weeks ahead.

That same season is Arizona’s monsoon, roughly June to September, and slot canyons are where monsoon rain concentrates. Operators cancel on flash flood warnings and refund or rebook at no charge, which sounds generous until you realize that your guide can pull the tour on a morning that looks perfect overhead. Rain that fills a slot canyon usually falls miles upstream, out of sight of the people standing in it. In August 1997 a flash flood in Lower Antelope killed eleven hikers, and mandatory guided access dates from that period. When a guide says the canyon is closed today, the canyon is closed today.

Shoulder months are the quiet win. April, May and early October still catch the edge of the beam season with noticeably thinner crowds. In winter there are no beams at all, but the diffused light is kinder to a phone camera, some operators cut their fares, and the only closures are Thanksgiving, Navajo Nation Family Day, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Summer park hours run 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

The time zone that wrecks bookings

Arizona doesn’t observe daylight saving time, and Page runs on Phoenix time all year. Both Antelope Canyon Tours and Taadidiin state this on their own sites, because it causes more missed tours than anything else on the reservation.

Here is the trap. The Navajo Nation does observe daylight saving time elsewhere, so Monument Valley sits an hour ahead of Page from March to November, and Utah is an hour ahead all summer too. Page is a short drive from the Utah line, and a phone left on automatic can latch onto a Utah tower and quietly jump an hour. Set your phone manually to Phoenix for the day. Turning up an hour early costs you a coffee in town; turning up an hour late costs you the tour, because slots are sold to capacity and nobody’s holding yours.

What you can carry, and what gets you turned away

The bag rules are set by operator, not by canyon, and they’re stricter than most visitors expect. Antelope Canyon Tours allows clear bags only in Upper Antelope, permits handheld photography and bans tripods and monopods on the sightseeing tour, along with pets and service animals. Dixie’s goes further in Lower Antelope: no bags at all, including transparent ones, though a child sling or carrier is fine. Ken’s bans tripods and professional camera equipment on every tour it runs. Taadidiin bans bags of any size on the Canyon X hiking tour and specifically names hydration packs.

In practice that means a phone or a camera on a strap, keys and cards in your pockets, and water carried in your hand. Read the confirmation email from your own operator rather than a blog post, because the four companies don’t agree with each other.

Getting to Page, and what else is worth a stop

Page has no useful public transport, so this is a car trip. It sits about 275 to 300 miles from Las Vegas, four and a half to five hours, and roughly 135 miles from Flagstaff. The Grand Canyon North Rim is 124 miles and about two and a half hours away, and the South Rim is a similar drive on the other side. If you’re pricing the drive, our guide to renting a car in the USA covers the deposit and insurance traps that catch visitors at the counter.

The natural route puts Page in the middle of a loop: fly into Las Vegas, drive out through Zion, overnight in Page for the canyons, then run south to the Grand Canyon. Our Arizona travel guide has the wider picture, including the $100 nonresident fee that now applies at the Grand Canyon and ten other national parks but does not apply on tribal land.

While you’re in town, Horseshoe Bend is the obvious pairing and it’s nothing like the canyon logistics: $10 per vehicle to the City of Page, no guide, no booking, about 0.6 miles each way on packed sand and 20 to 25 minutes to the overlook. The graded path is passable with assistance, but most of the rim has no guardrail and the drop is sheer, so keep children close. The clean day is a mid-morning canyon tour, lunch in Page and Horseshoe Bend for the last hour of light. For picking the month in the first place, our best time to visit the USA breakdown puts the Southwest in the context of the rest of the country.

Read also

• Arizona Travel Guide - the state in full, including tribal land rules and Sedona
• Grand Canyon - the obvious next stop south of Page
• Zion National Park - the shuttle system and the Angels Landing permit lottery
• Renting a Car in the USA - what the counter does not tell you