Salt Lake Temple Tours
April 5 – October 1, 2027 · Temple Square
For the first time in more than 130 years, the public is invited inside the Salt Lake Temple. After a monumental seven-year renovation, guided walking tours of Utah's most famous landmark will welcome visitors of every background, seven days a week, for six months only. Then the doors close again, likely for generations.
This is your complete visitor guide: the remarkable 40-year story of how the temple was built, what the renovation changed, how tickets work, and how to plan a Salt Lake City visit around it.
Salt Lake Temple Tours at a Glance
Public walking tours of the newly renovated Salt Lake Temple run daily from April 5 through October 1, 2027, from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, as part of the Salt Lake Temple Celebration hosted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Tickets are required, and every ticket is tied to a specific timed entry. Ticket reservations open September 1, 2026. Up to 5 million visitors are expected, so demand for tickets is projected to be intense, much like the ticketed Sunday Tabernacle Choir broadcast, where walk-ins are regularly turned away.
Temple Tour + Sightseeing Tour Packages
City Sights SLC Tours, Salt Lake City's family-run sightseeing company for more than 45 years, is preparing special 2027 tour options built around the Salt Lake Temple Tours, including combinations with our Salt Lake City Guided Bus Tour and our Tabernacle Choir tour, plus a brand-new tour created just for this once-in-a-generation event.
Details will be announced right here. Questions in the meantime? Call our local Utah team.
801-364-3333Forty Years in the Making
Four days. That is how long Brigham Young had been in the Salt Lake Valley when, on July 28, 1847, he walked to a spot between two forks of City Creek, marked the ground, and declared, "Here will be the Temple of our God." The entire city was then platted outward from that point. To this day, every street address in Salt Lake City tells you how many blocks you are from Temple Square. The temple is not just in the center of the city; the city was drawn around the temple.
Ground was broken on February 14, 1853, and the cornerstones were laid that April 6. Nobody swinging a pick that winter could have guessed the project would outlive most of them. The temple took 40 years to complete, one of the longest continuous construction projects in American history, finished 24 years after the transcontinental railroad and only a few years before the automobile.
Granite by Ox-Drawn Wagon
The walls are cut from quartz monzonite, a stone so granite-like that everyone simply calls it granite, quarried at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon about 20 miles southeast of the city. Workers pried enormous blocks, each weighing 2,500 to 5,600 pounds, from boulders that glaciers had already sheared off the canyon walls. Whole villages of quarrymen and their families grew up around the work.
Getting the stone to Temple Square was the hard part. Teams of oxen dragged each block across the valley, a trip that could take as long as four days, for one stone. When a rail spur finally reached the quarry in 1873, delivery time dropped from four days to about one hour, and the walls began to climb in earnest.
The Foundation They Buried Like a Farm Field
In 1858, with a U.S. Army expedition marching toward Utah during the tensions known as the Utah War, workers did something extraordinary: they buried the entire temple foundation under dirt and plowed the lot so it looked like an ordinary farm field. When soldiers passed through, they found an abandoned city and no sign of a temple at all.
When the foundation was finally uncovered years later, inspectors found cracks in the sandstone footings. Brigham Young ordered the compromised stone torn out and replaced with granite footings 16 feet thick, declaring, "I want to see the Temple built in a manner that it will endure through the Millennium." Fourteen years after the cornerstones were laid, the walls had only just reached ground level. The builders were, by every account, entirely at peace with that pace.
The Capstone, an Electric Switch, and a Golden Angel
On April 6, 1892, exactly 39 years after the cornerstones were laid, an estimated 40,000 people packed Temple Square to watch the final exterior stone go into place. In a flourish of Gilded Age showmanship, church president Wilford Woodruff pressed an electric switch that set the capstone, cutting-edge technology in 1892. Later that same day, the gold-leafed Angel Moroni statue was hoisted to the top of the 210-foot east center spire.
The 12.5-foot statue was sculpted by Cyrus Dallin, a celebrated, Paris-trained Utah artist who was not a member of the church. Dallin later said creating the angel "brought me nearer to God than anything I ever did." Formed of hammered copper and covered in gold leaf, the statue has watched over the city ever since, and with the statue included, the temple rises 222.5 feet.
At the capstone ceremony, Woodruff issued a challenge: finish the entire interior in one year so the temple could be dedicated 40 years to the day after its commencement. Astonishingly, they made it. The Salt Lake Temple was dedicated on April 6, 1893, in the first of 31 dedicatory sessions attended by tens of thousands.
Reading the Stones: Symbols Carved into the Temple
The exterior of the Salt Lake Temple is covered in hand-carved symbolism, and knowing what to look for turns a walk around Temple Square into a treasure hunt. Every carving was cut by hand from granite. Here is your field guide.
Sunstones
Carved suns crown the temple's 50 buttresses. In the church's teaching they evoke the highest heavenly glory; to architecture lovers they are among the finest stone carving in the American West.
Moonstones in Phases
Look at the moons around the building: they are carved in different phases, new to full, often read as the changing phases of life and of faith.
Earthstones
At the base of each buttress sits a carved globe. Each buttress stone is about four feet wide and weighs more than 6,000 pounds.
The Big Dipper
High on the west center tower is a carved Big Dipper, positioned so its pointer stars align with the actual North Star. The message, in the words of temple architect Truman O. Angell: the lost may find their way.
Clasped Hands
Above the doors, two hands meet in a handshake, a 19th-century emblem of fellowship, welcome, and promises kept.
The All-Seeing Eye
Each center tower bears an all-seeing eye, a symbol common in 19th-century America (check your dollar bill) representing the watchfulness of God.
Starstones
Five-pointed stars dot the towers. Some point downward with an elongated ray, a design historians read as heaven reaching toward earth.
Beehive Doorknobs
The beehive, Utah's state emblem of industry and cooperation, appears on the temple's original doors and doorknobs. Yes, even the doorknobs are symbolic.
Six Spires
Three towers rise on the east and three on the west, with the east spires slightly taller. Church teaching links them to two orders of priesthood; visitors know them as the most recognizable silhouette in Utah.
What Is Actually Inside the Salt Lake Temple?
This is the question that makes the 2027 tours historic. Latter-day Saint temples are not Sunday churches; the church describes them as houses of the Lord, reserved after dedication for the faith's most sacred ceremonies, including marriages and ordinances that members believe unite families for eternity. Once a temple is dedicated, only church members in good standing may enter. That is why, apart from official photographs, almost no living person outside the faith has seen these rooms, and why a six-month public window is such a rarity.
The photographs below are from 1911–1912, when the church published the first authorized interior images in the book The House of the Lord. During your 2027 tour, you will walk through spaces like these, meticulously restored by modern craftspeople working by hand.
The Celestial Room
The grandest space in the temple, a soaring room of chandeliers, mirrors, and ornate plasterwork that members consider a symbol of heaven, a place of quiet peace and reflection. Early visitors compared its Gilded Age craftsmanship to the finest hotel parlors and opera houses of the era, except that every element was made by pioneer artisans in a desert territory a thousand miles from the nearest metropolis.
The Baptistry and the Twelve Oxen
The temple's baptismal font rests on the backs of twelve life-size sculpted oxen, a design the church patterns after the "molten sea" that stood on twelve oxen in Solomon's Temple in the Old Testament. The renovation added a second baptistry, a first among the church's temples.
The Grand Staircases
Sweeping granite and hardwood staircases spiral through the temple's corners. Consider what that meant in the 1880s: pioneer craftsmen, many of them immigrant stonemasons and woodworkers from England, Scandinavia, and Switzerland who crossed an ocean and a continent for the project, hand-fitting curved stairwork inside nine-foot-thick stone walls.
The Renovation: Teaching a 19th-Century Temple to Ride Out Earthquakes
The temple closed on December 29, 2019, for the largest renovation in its history, a roughly $2 billion project two decades in the planning. The mission: make a 185-million-pound stone building, standing near Utah's Wasatch Fault, capable of surviving a major earthquake, without changing the face it has shown the world since 1893.
The solution is one of the boldest feats of preservation engineering ever attempted. Crews excavated beneath the temple, threaded steel pipes under the original pioneer foundation, and slid 98 base isolators, each capable of carrying 8 million pounds, between the building and the earth about 20 feet below ground. In a quake, the ground can now shift up to five feet in any direction while the temple above stays calm. Engineers say a magnitude 7.2 earthquake would feel to the building like a 5.2.
In June 2026, crews removed the final 1,500 bolts holding the isolation system rigid during construction. In the words of the construction team, the temple was "set free," floating on its seismic cushions, ready for its second century and beyond.
The Earthquake That Proved the Point
On March 18, 2020, just weeks into the renovation, a magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck the Salt Lake Valley and shook the trumpet right out of the Angel Moroni statue's hands. The statue was taken down for safekeeping, restored to gleaming condition, and returned to its spire by crane on April 2, 2024, gold trumpet firmly reattached. The original weathered trumpet is now displayed at the Church History Museum, one block from the temple, where you can see it up close.
Restored by Hand
While engineers worked below, artisans restored interiors above: hand-finishing woodwork and plaster, installing art-glass windows, and updating the building's systems for accessibility and for visitors from around the world. A new underground addition on the north side added roughly 100,000 square feet, and the temple's historic oak doors were refurbished and rehung.
What to Expect on a Salt Lake Temple Tour in 2027
Tours run daily from April 5 through October 1, 2027, between 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM, and every visitor needs a timed-entry ticket reserved in advance. Reservations open September 1, 2026. Plan on roughly 45 to 60 minutes inside the temple, plus time for security lines and for exploring the rest of Temple Square, so a comfortable visit fills half a day.
Everyone is welcome, all ages and all backgrounds, and no religious affiliation is expected. Tours are wheelchair accessible; note any mobility needs when you reserve and when you arrive. Comfortable walking shoes and modest dress are recommended. With up to 5 million visitors anticipated over six months, spring weekdays and September are likely to be the calmest windows, while summer weekends around holidays will be the busiest.
One date matters more than any other: October 1, 2027, is the final day. Afterward the temple will be rededicated and reserved once again for church members, as it has been since 1893. The grounds, gardens, and Temple Square attractions remain open to everyone year-round, but the interior window closes, likely for the rest of our lifetimes.
While You're on Temple Square
The Salt Lake Tabernacle, home of the world-famous Tabernacle Choir and its 11,623-pipe organ, sits just west of the temple. The building's acoustics are so precise that a pin dropped at the pulpit can be heard 170 feet away. Twelve U.S. presidents have spoken from its stand.
The new Temple Square Visitors' Center, opened in May 2026, features a motorized scale model of the Salt Lake Temple that opens to reveal its interior rooms, plus a guided walk-through of full-scale temple replica rooms, a helpful primer before your 2027 tour.
Historic pioneer homes, including Brigham Young's Beehive House (1854) and Lion House (1856), the Assembly Hall (1882), gardens, reflecting pools, and 14 sculptures round out the five-block campus in the heart of downtown, steps from the Temple Square TRAX light-rail station.
Salt Lake Temple Timeline
- 1847
July 28. Four days after entering the valley, Brigham Young marks the temple site: "Here will be the Temple of our God."
- 1853
February 14. Groundbreaking. Cornerstones are laid on April 6.
- 1858
The foundation is buried and disguised as a plowed field during the Utah War.
- 1862
Cracked sandstone footings are ordered replaced with granite 16 feet thick, built "to endure through the Millennium."
- 1873
A rail spur reaches the Little Cottonwood Canyon quarry. Stone delivery drops from four days by ox team to one hour by train.
- 1877
Brigham Young dies with the walls only 20 feet above ground. Three church presidents will lead the project before it is finished.
- 1892
April 6. Before an estimated 40,000 people, the capstone is set by electric switch and the gold Angel Moroni statue is placed atop the 210-foot east spire.
- 1893
April 6. Dedication, 40 years to the day after the cornerstones. The interior was completed in a single year.
- 1962
The temple closes briefly while a new annex is built; it reopens with expanded capacity in 1966.
- 1993
The exterior receives a deep cleaning for its centennial, restoring the granite's bright tone.
- 2019
December 29. The temple closes for its largest renovation ever.
- 2020
March 18. A magnitude 5.7 earthquake knocks the trumpet from the Angel Moroni statue, underscoring the renovation's purpose.
- 2024
April 2. The restored Angel Moroni returns to the spire by crane, trumpet in hand.
- 2026
June. The seismic base isolation system is completed; the temple now floats on 98 isolators. Reservations for the 2027 tours open September 1, 2026.
- 2027
April 5 – October 1. Public tours of the Salt Lake Temple, daily. The first look inside in more than 130 years, and the last for generations.
Salt Lake Temple Tours: Frequently Asked Questions
When are the Salt Lake Temple tours?
Salt Lake Temple tours run daily from April 5 through October 1, 2027, from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, at Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City. After October 1, 2027, the temple will be rededicated and will no longer be open to the public.
Do I need tickets for the Salt Lake Temple tour?
Yes. Tickets are required, and every ticket is tied to a specific timed entry. Reservations open September 1, 2026, through the Temple Square app and website operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With up to 5 million visitors expected, tickets for popular dates are likely to be claimed quickly, much like the ticketed Sunday Tabernacle Choir broadcast, where guests without tickets are regularly turned away.
How long does a Salt Lake Temple tour take?
Plan on about 45 to 60 minutes inside the temple, plus additional time for security lines and entry. Most visitors will want at least half a day to also enjoy the Tabernacle, the new Temple Square Visitors' Center, the gardens, and the historic buildings around Temple Square.
Who can go on the Salt Lake Temple tours? Do I need to be a church member?
Everyone is welcome. The 2027 tours are open to visitors of every faith and background, and children of all ages may attend. No religious affiliation is expected. This is precisely what makes the event historic: once the temple is rededicated after October 1, 2027, entry is reserved for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it has been since 1893.
Will the Salt Lake Temple ever be open to the public again after 2027?
There are no plans for future public access. Following the tours, the temple will be rededicated and reserved for church members. The previous opportunity to see inside was before the original dedication in April 1893, which is why the 2027 tours are widely described as a once-in-a-lifetime, or once-in-several-generations, event. The temple grounds, gardens, and Temple Square attractions remain open to everyone year-round.
Are the tours wheelchair accessible?
Yes, the tours are wheelchair accessible. If you have mobility needs, note them when you reserve your tickets and let staff know when you arrive so they can assist you.
What should I wear on the tour?
Comfortable walking shoes and modest dress are recommended. You will be walking through the temple and across Temple Square, and Salt Lake City summers are warm and sunny, so dress in layers in spring and fall and bring sun protection in summer.
Where is the Salt Lake Temple, and how do I get there?
The Salt Lake Temple stands at 50 W North Temple Street on Temple Square, the five-block historic heart of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. The Temple Square TRAX light-rail station is steps away, paid parking is available downtown including at City Creek Center, and the temple is about a 15-minute drive from Salt Lake City International Airport. Shuttle arrangements are planned for the 2027 tour season.
Why was the Salt Lake Temple closed, and what changed in the renovation?
The temple closed on December 29, 2019, for a seismic and structural renovation two decades in the planning. Crews installed 98 base isolators beneath the foundation, each able to carry 8 million pounds, allowing the ground to move up to five feet in an earthquake while the temple stays stable. Engineers say a magnitude 7.2 quake would feel like a 5.2 to the building. Interiors were restored by hand, art-glass windows were installed, accessibility was improved, and an underground addition of roughly 100,000 square feet was built on the north side.
Can I see inside a temple before the 2027 tours begin?
Yes. The new Temple Square Visitors' Center, opened in May 2026 just south of the temple, offers a guided 30-minute walk through full-scale replica temple rooms, including a baptistry, sealing room, and celestial room, plus a motorized scale model of the Salt Lake Temple that opens to reveal its interior. It is an excellent preview, and a wonderful stop on any Salt Lake City sightseeing itinerary right now.
Will City Sights SLC Tours offer sightseeing tours that pair with the Salt Lake Temple tours?
Yes, plans are underway. City Sights SLC Tours, Salt Lake City's family-run sightseeing company for more than 45 years, is preparing 2027 tour options designed around the Salt Lake Temple tours, including combinations with the Salt Lake City Guided Bus Tour and the Tabernacle Choir tour, plus a new tour created for this event. Details will be announced on this page. For questions in the meantime, call 801-364-3333 to speak with our local Utah team.
See Salt Lake City with the Family That Knows It Best
City Sights SLC Tours has shown visitors the story of Salt Lake City for more than 45 years, three generations, one family. Our guided bus tours pass Temple Square daily, our Tabernacle Choir tour includes tickets to the choir's famous Sunday broadcast, and our guides are Utah locals who love this history as much as you will. When the Salt Lake Temple tour packages are announced, travelers on this page will be the first to know.
Booking questions? Real people, right here in Utah:
801-364-3333About this guide. Written and maintained by the team at City Sights SLC Tours in Salt Lake City, Utah. Last updated July 2026; details for the 2027 tour season will be updated as they are announced. Historical and event facts are drawn from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Newsroom and Church News announcements, 2019–2026), reporting by Deseret News, KSL, FOX 13 Salt Lake City, and the Salt Lake Tribune, Engineering News-Record's coverage of the seismic renovation, the Utah Geological Survey, Utah historical archives, and the 1912 volume The House of the Lord. Historic photographs are in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons and the U.S. National Archives; the lead photograph is by David Iliff (CC BY 2.5). This page is an independent visitor guide and is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.