Three Ways to Buy a Ski Day in Vail and Beaver Creek, and What Your Address Already Gets You

A friend asked me last week what it costs to ski Vail for a day. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on when you ask the question. The same chairlift, the same snow, the same Tuesday in February can run you about $116 or something close to $400, and the only variable that moved is how far ahead you decided to commit.

That is not an accident. Vail Resorts sells winter in advance, and the whole pricing structure is built to reward people who buy early and to charge a premium to people who show up at the window. If you own here, or you are thinking about it, this is worth understanding once and then acting on, because there is a deadline sitting in front of us. The lowest price of the fall ends September 7.

The Rule That Shapes All of It

Every ski day in this valley is sold at one of three tiers, and they are not close to each other in price. A season pass product is the cheapest way to ski. A lift ticket bought online well in advance is the middle. Walking up to the ticket window on the morning you want to ski is the most expensive decision available to you, by a wide margin.

Prices for next winter are actually lowest in the spring, when passes first go on sale for the following season. We are past that. What we are in now is the fall step, and September 7 is the last day at the current number before it moves again.

Rung One: The Season Passes

There are three products that matter for someone skiing Vail and Beaver Creek. Here is where they stood in August 2026.

• Epic Pass. $1,119 adult. Unlimited and unrestricted at Vail and Beaver Creek every day of the season, plus Breckenridge, Keystone, Crested Butte, Park City, Whistler Blackcomb, and a long list of partner mountains in Europe, Japan, and Canada. $889 for teens 13 to 17 and young adults 18 to 30, $569 for children 5 to 12. Comes with five Epic Friend Tickets for up to 50 percent off lift tickets for guests.
• Epic Local Pass. $829 adult. The same mountains, with peak dates restricted at Vail and Beaver Creek. $659 teen and young adult, $435 child.
• Epic Day Pass. One to seven days, bought in advance. Four days with All Resorts access runs $461 for an adult, or $116 per day, with holiday access available for another $84. You pick the days later. It does not include Epic Friend Tickets.

The teen and young adult numbers are new this year. Vail Resorts introduced a 20 percent discount for ages 13 through 30, which is a meaningful change for families with kids in that band and for anyone buying passes for adult children who visit.

The Restricted Dates Are the Whole Difference

The $290 gap between the Epic Pass and the Epic Local Pass buys you four blocks of the calendar. For 2026/27, the Epic Local Pass is restricted at Vail and Beaver Creek on:

• November 27 and 28, 2026, Thanksgiving weekend
• December 26 through 31, 2026, the week between Christmas and New Year's
• January 16, 2027, Martin Luther King Jr. weekend
• February 13 and 14, 2027, Presidents Day weekend

Read that list against your own calendar rather than in the abstract. In my experience the people most likely to buy the Local Pass to save money are second-home owners, and the people most likely to be here during Christmas week are also second-home owners. If your family flies in for the holidays and your pass does not work at your home mountain, you have not saved $290, you have moved it and added friction. Owners who are here in January and March, and deliberately not here at Christmas, are the ones the Local Pass genuinely fits.

Rung Two: Buying Online, in Advance

If a pass product does not fit, the next best thing is buying lift tickets online ahead of your trip. Vail Resorts prices tickets on a sliding scale where the further out you buy, the less you pay, and they have been explicit that planning ahead is what earns the lower rate. Buying three or four weeks out is materially cheaper than buying the night before.

For an owner, this rung mostly matters for guests. You will have friends and family out here, and the five Epic Friend Tickets that come with a full pass are the cheapest way to get them on the hill at up to half off the window rate. Plan that in October, not the night before they land.

Rung Three: The Window

This is the one to avoid.

Single-day walk-up tickets at Vail and Beaver Creek hit $356 on peak days during the 2025/26 season, and reporting has put the 2026/27 peak figure near $400. Vail Resorts itself frames the Epic Day Pass as costing up to 65 percent less than a lift ticket bought at the window. Two peak window tickets for a couple run to roughly two-thirds of a full season pass, which is the whole argument, and it is why almost nobody who lives or owns here ever buys at the window.

Running Your Own Numbers

The math is simpler than people make it.

Take the number of days you honestly expect to be on snow this winter, not the number you would like to be.

Under about six days, the Epic Day Pass usually wins, and you should decide whether you need holiday access before you buy rather than after. Somewhere in the range of ten days or more, a full pass is clearly the right product and the only remaining question is whether you can live with the restricted dates. Between those two, it depends on whether you value the flexibility to ski on a whim, which is worth more to owners than to visitors, because you are already here.

One factor people leave out: Epic Mountain Rewards comes with every pass and takes 20 percent off food, lodging, equipment rentals, and group lessons. If you have kids in ski school or you rent gear, that discount is not a rounding error, and it does not appear anywhere in a simple cost-per-day calculation.

Buy Now and You Can Ride This Fall

Here is a benefit that gets overlooked because it arrives in the wrong season. A 2026/27 Epic Pass or Epic Local Pass includes free summer scenic lift and gondola rides at participating resorts before the winter season starts, along with 20 percent off bike rentals, golf, food, and lodging.

Buy your pass by September 7 and you can use it that same month. Vail Mountain runs through September 27, daily through September 7 and then Friday through Sunday. Beaver Creek runs through September 27, daily through September 7 and then Saturday and Sunday. Those last three weekends land squarely in aspen color season, and riding up with the gold coming in below you is one of the better arguments for living here that I can make.

The exception matters: the Epic Day Pass does not include summer scenic lift rides. If riding this fall is part of why you are buying, that rules the Day Pass out.

First Tracks, and Why the Two Mountains Do It Differently

Here is the benefit I actually use. Both mountains run a First Tracks program that puts you on the hill before the public, and they are not the same deal at all, which trips people up because they share a name.

At Vail it is free. Epic Pass Holder First Tracks, presented by Helly Hansen, loads Gondola One at 7:30 a.m. and feeds you breakfast at Two Elk afterward, at no charge. It is open to full Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, and Epic Day Pass holders alike, which is worth noticing: this is one of the few perks where the Day Pass gets you the same thing the $1,119 pass does. Reservations are required, they go first come first served, and they fill. The last one I have a record of was posted as registration full well before the date.

At Beaver Creek you pay for it. First Tracks at Beaver Creek, presented by Helly Hansen and American Express, starts at 7:15 a.m. at the base of Centennial Express with hosts who point you at the best snow, then a buffet breakfast at Spruce Saddle mid-mountain. Last season it ran three mornings and was priced at $220 per adult, $113 for children 4 to 12, and $108 for non-skiers who just want the breakfast and the view. A valid lift ticket or season pass is required on top of that, so here the pass is the price of entry rather than the thing that gets you in.

As of this posting, neither mountain has announced its 2026/27 First Tracks dates. I would be very surprised if both did not run again, and I expect the schedule well before opening day. Set a reminder for the Vail one rather than checking casually in December, because a free morning with a capped list goes the way you would expect.

Empty corduroy in the early light, before the mountain has been touched, is genuinely one of the better things available to you here. I am out there for those mornings most seasons.

What Your Address Already Gets You

Everything above is the same for a visitor from Dallas and for someone who owns in Bachelor Gulch. The pass is a pass. What changes with ownership is the second layer.

What an address here buys you is proximity to the lift, and sometimes eligibility for a private club. Both are worth pricing as carefully as the pass itself, and neither one shows up in a listing with a number attached.

Ski-in ski-out is a spectrum, not a label

There is no regulated definition. In listings it covers everything from clicking in at your own door to a four-minute walk with your boots already on. The most common version in the real world is ski-out but not ski-in, because the return leg runs uphill and nobody mentions that in the photographs.

Across the Beaver Creek block the pattern runs roughly like this. Bachelor Gulch sits at the strong end, built as a ski village from the start, with the great majority of its homes on terrain feeding the Bachelor Gulch Express. Arrowhead is organized around the Arrow Bahn Express at the base of the village, which is also where the Arrowhead Alpine Club sits. Beaver Creek Village itself varies the most, because a property three minutes from the escalators and a property up the hill behind it are described in listings using identical language.

Walk the route in ski boots before you believe the label. It takes fifteen minutes.

The three villages are one mountain

Beaver Creek Village, Bachelor Gulch, and Arrowhead connect on snow. That is the thing that makes this block work: three distinct front doors onto the same mountain, with genuinely different characters and price points behind each one.

When you would rather not ski between them, Village Connect runs complimentary on-demand door-to-door shuttles across all three villages, generally from 7:00 a.m. to midnight, summoned from an app. For a buyer comparing a Bachelor Gulch home against one in Arrowhead, the shuttle is part of the honest comparison, because it quietly erases a lot of the practical distance between them.

The Avon question

The Riverfront Express Gondola runs from the Westin and the Avon Transportation Center to Beaver Creek Landing in about three minutes, and lifts carry you onto the mountain from there. This comes up constantly, because an Avon condominium and a Beaver Creek condominium can be a very long way apart on price while being reasonably close together on the actual morning routine.

They are not the same thing, and I would not tell you they are. But knowing precisely what the gap is worth is exactly the kind of question that decides which side of it you buy on.

Clubs are the layer above the pass

For a number of owners here the real ski-day experience is not decided by which Epic product they hold but by whether their skis live in a valet locker at the base of the lift. That is a club question, and it has its own economics, its own waitlists, and its own relationship to real estate. Some memberships require ownership in a specific village, some transfer with the home, and at least one club in the valley is closed to new names entirely. I wrote about that in detail in the guide to the valley's private clubs, because "membership available" in a listing deserves a much closer read than it usually gets.

Opening Day

Vail Mountain is scheduled to open November 13 and Beaver Creek on November 25. Both are weather dependent, as they always are. That is roughly twelve weeks out, which is also about how long it takes to find, negotiate, and close on a property if you started today and wanted to be in it for the season.

What I Tell Clients

Decide your day count first, then buy the product that matches it, and do it before the price steps up on September 7. Check the restricted dates against the weeks your family actually comes out, because that is where the Local Pass either saves you real money or costs you the trip you cared about most.

And if you are weighing an address in this block rather than a pass, the ski access question deserves the same treatment as the financial ones. Which lift, how far, uphill or down, what conveys, and what only looks like it conveys. For buyers coming from outside Colorado, the step-by-step guide to buying here from out of state or abroad covers the rest of the process, and the guide to the valley's neighborhoods is the place to start if you have not settled on where yet.

And if the early mornings are your thing, skip the second cup of coffee and come find me. I will see you on the First Tracks mornings.

A note on this article: Pass products, prices, restricted dates, and operating schedules are set by Vail Resorts and change without much notice. Every figure here was verified in August 2026 and is offered to explain how the tiers relate to each other, not as a current price list. Confirm the numbers directly at epicpass.com before you buy, and confirm ski access, club eligibility, and what conveys with any specific property in that property's own documents.