How to get free admission to 16 San Francisco museums with just one membership

If you’re planning a visit to San Francisco—or if you already live here—you’ll want to know about the NARM card. Here’s the deal: Purchase a year membership to a participating museum (even if it’s in your hometown somewhere else in the U.S.), and then you can visit all of San Francisco’s 16 NARM sites for free.

Some NARM sites have a funny little quirk, though, where you can’t gain entry to another institution within a 15-mile radius of the one where you bought your membership. But luckily none of San Francisco’s NARM sites have that restriction.

NARM stands for the North American Reciprocal Museum Association, a network of 1,380 art and history museums, zoos, gardens, cultural sites and more. When you purchase a membership with a NARM-participating museum, you automatically gain free entry into all the other museums in the network (including ones in Bermuda, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico and Mexico, too!) New sites are added every week. Your “NARM card” is really just your membership card to your home museum—in fact, you may already be a NARM member without knowing it.

We find this is a godsend on road trips when you just want to stop somewhere for an hour and see something interesting without doling out any money. And while you might think the NARM sites must be the “B list” of museums, that’s really not the case: We’ve found that top tier museums and attractions appear on the NARM list.

Bonus on top of the bonus? NARM also gives member discounts at museum shops and cafés and for concert/lecture tickets.

Here are the 16 NARM sites in San Francisco, in alphabetical order:

Asian Art Museum

Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco

Chinese Historical Society of America

deYoung Museum

GLBT History Museum

Gray Area

Legion of Honor

Letterform Archive

Museo Italo Americano

Museum of the African Diaspora

Museum of Craft & Design

San Francisco Women Artists Gallery

Tenderloin Museum

USS Pampanito

Walt Disney Family Museum

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

And for nearby Bay Area NARM sites:

Oakland:

Camron-Stanford House

Chabot Space & Science Center

Junior Center of Art & Science

Oakland Museum of California

Berkeley:

Doug Adams Gallery

Kala Art Institute

UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley

UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Alameda:

USS Hornet Museum

Richmond:

NIAD Art Center

Richmond Art Center