Choosing between them

Queen Elizabeth or Murchison Falls?

Name: Queen Elizabeth National Park
Address: Uganda

Uganda's two big savannah parks, and we run the independent guides to both, which is why we can put them side by side without a thumb on the scale. They sit on the same western circuit and most people who have the time end up doing both. If you only have room for one, these are the differences that decide it.

If you only want the answer

Pick Murchison Falls if you want a shorter drive, the strongest large-mammal odds in Uganda and a waterfall at the end of a boat trip: 305 km and four to five hours from Kampala, roughly 2,250 Nubian giraffe, 240 lions on its last survey, and a launch that runs up to the foot of the falls. Pick Queen Elizabeth if you want variety over volume: Uganda's largest elephant population and its longest bird list, chimpanzees in Kyambura Gorge, the fig-tree lions of Ishasha and a two-hour cruise on the channel between two lakes, at 410 km and, on UWA's own estimate, seven to eight hours from Kampala. A standard day of park fees comes to about $48 at Queen Elizabeth against $60 at Murchison, because Murchison is alone in UWA's top Category A+ entrance band. Murchison has giraffe and Queen Elizabeth has none. Neither park has zebra. The two are 440 km apart by road and combine comfortably on one trip through Fort Portal and Kibale.

Side by side

The core of the decision, with every figure dated and attributed. The rest of the page explains it.

	Queen Elizabeth	Murchison Falls
Standard day, park fees only	About $48, and we mark it incomplete	About $60
Entry fee, foreign non-resident	$40 per person per 24 hours (Category A)	$45 per person per 24 hours (Category A+, alone in Uganda's top band)
Vehicle fee, foreign-registered 4x4	$150/day, or UGX 30,000, about $8, on Ugandan plates	$160/day, or about $11 on Ugandan plates including the park surcharge
Size	1,978 km² park; UWA's plan also prints 1,987 km²	3,840 km² park, inside a 5,072 km² conservation area
Drive from Kampala	410 km; UWA says at least 7 to 8 hours, operators say 5 to 6	305 km, 4 to 5 hours via Masindi, tar the whole way
Flying in	Aerolink to Kasese airstrip, about 1 h 15 from Entebbe, then 1.5 to 2 hours by road to Mweya	Aerolink to Pakuba, Bugungu or Chobe, about 1 h from Entebbe, landing in the park
The boat trip	Kazinga Channel launch, $30, about 2 hours, max 40 passengers, from Mweya marina	Launch from Paraa to the foot of the falls, $30, max 45 passengers; a separate delta cruise runs downstream
Chimpanzees	Kyambura Gorge, $100, park entry charged separately; an isolated group of roughly 20 to 30 animals	Kaniyo Pabidi in Budongo, a habituated group, with no price anywhere in UWA's tariff
Giraffe	None; UWA's 2026 report lists no giraffe in this park	About 2,250 Nubian giraffe, the largest population left in the wild
Elephant	Uganda's largest population; 4,711 plus or minus 1,106 on the 2018 aerial camera survey	Roughly 1,000 to 1,600 in the park; second to Queen Elizabeth nationally
Lion	Ishasha's tree-climbing lions, 20 to 30 animals in that sector; 93 identified park-wide in 2025	240 in the 2022 survey, Uganda's best odds by a distance
Bird list	Over 600 species, the longest of any protected area in Uganda	Around 450 species, with shoebill in the delta
Visitors, FY2022/23	97,814	145,116 headline, of which 38 per cent were transit traffic, leaving about 90,300
Best dry window	June and July, with a second in January and February	December to February, and a dip in June
Wettest month	April, 339 mm over 18 rain days	October, 234 mm over 20 rain days

Fee figures from the UWA Conservation Tariff July 2024 to June 2026 for both parks, and the standard-day totals from our own Safari Fee Index, all checked 18 September 2026. Wildlife figures from UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026, UWA's two General Management Plans and the surveys cited on each park's wildlife page. Rainfall from Open-Meteo climate normals for 1991 to 2020. Confirm fees before travelling: UWA's tariff expired on 30 June 2026 and no replacement has been published.

Why a day costs more at Murchison

UWA prices its parks in bands, and Murchison Falls sits on its own at the top. It is the only park in Category A+, so a foreign non-resident pays $45 per person per 24 hours there against $40 at Queen Elizabeth, which sits in Category A alongside Kidepo, Bwindi, Mgahinga, Kibale and Lake Mburo.

Our Safari Fee Index compares 31 African parks on one standard day, defined as the park fees one international adult pays for 24 hours: the person's entry fee, half a vehicle's daily fee on the assumption that two people share it, and one night at the cheapest bookable public campsite. On that measure Queen Elizabeth comes out at about $48 and Murchison at about $60, which puts them ninth and fourteenth cheapest of the 31. Both are well under the index median of $69.

The Queen Elizabeth total carries an asterisk and it is worth understanding. UWA prices the Category C public campsite in Ugandan shillings only, at UGX 40,000, and says nothing about what a foreign non-resident pays there. The campsite component of the Queen Elizabeth day is therefore undefined in the source document, so we publish $48 as a floor rather than a finished figure.

The line that catches self-drivers is the same at both parks. A foreign-registered 4x4 pays $150 a day at Queen Elizabeth and $160 at Murchison. The identical vehicle on Ugandan plates, which is what nearly every hire car is, pays about $8 and $11 respectively. If you are driving your own vehicle in from Kenya, Rwanda or Tanzania, the vehicle can cost you more than the people in it.

Two further differences in how the meter runs. At Murchison, vehicles belonging to concessionaire lodges are charged once per trip rather than per 24 hours, so sleeping inside the park changes the sum. And at both parks a ticket runs 24 hours from the hour you drive through the gate, so a trip that starts at midday and finishes at four in the afternoon two days later is charged as three days.

Getting there, and the seven-hour question

Murchison is the easier journey and it is not close. UWA and our own routing agree on 305 km from Kampala, four to five hours via Masindi, on tar the whole way, and since 2022 a bridge at Paraa has replaced the ferry that used to hold up the crossing of the Nile.

Queen Elizabeth is 410 km from Kampala, and here the sources fight. UWA's own park page says the direct drive takes at least seven to eight hours. Plenty of operators quote five to six. Routing the real road network gives about six hours of free-flow driving, which is the theoretical floor on an empty road, and western Uganda rarely offers one. We would plan for UWA's number.

There are two ways in and they suit different trips. The southern route runs Kampala, Masaka, Mbarara, Bushenyi and into the park at Katunguru, which puts Lake Mburo on the way and drops you close to Mweya and the channel. The northern route runs Kampala, Mubende, Fort Portal, Kasese and in past the equator markers at Kikorongo, which is the route to take if you want Kibale's chimpanzees or the Rwenzori foothills in the same trip.

Flying favours Murchison too. Aerolink lands inside Murchison at Pakuba, Bugungu or Chobe in about an hour from Entebbe. For Queen Elizabeth the scheduled service lands at Kasese airstrip, which is outside the park, leaving another hour and a half to two hours by road to Mweya. Both parks lose most of their Aerolink frequencies in March, April, May and November, when only the earliest rotation runs.

One practical trap inside Queen Elizabeth that has no equivalent at Murchison: the Ishasha sector is a long way from everything else. Our map page puts Mweya to Ishasha at about 107 km and two and a half to three hours on unpaved road with a 40 km/h limit inside the park. Our own routing check came out 107 km, in line with the official figures added together. Either way, it is an overnight rather than an afternoon, and the 24-hour ticket clock keeps running while you drive.

Two boat trips with the same price and nothing else in common

Both parks charge $30 for their signature cruise, and the two trips are as different as water gets.

The Kazinga Channel launch leaves the Mweya marina and runs a wide natural waterway that joins Lake George to Lake Edward. It takes about two hours, carries up to 40 passengers, and its appeal is density of life along a shoreline: hippo, buffalo and elephant coming down to drink, crocodile on the banks, and the waterbirds that give this park the longest bird list in Uganda. There is no destination at the end of it. The channel is the point.

The Murchison launch leaves Paraa and runs upriver to where the Victoria Nile forces itself through a seven-metre gap and drops into Fajao gorge. It carries up to 45 people, stops close enough to feel the spray, and the classic way to do it is to step off at the base, walk up through the gorge with a ranger and have your vehicle meet you at the top. That combination is the best half-day in either park. A separate boat from the same jetty runs downstream into the Nile delta, which is where UWA names the best chance in the country of seeing shoebill.

If a waterfall is the photograph you want, only one of these parks has one. If you would rather watch animals at close range from the water for two hours without a set-piece at the end, the channel does that as well as anywhere in East Africa.

The animals, one by one

Both of our guides carry a species-by-species verdict built from UWA's published surveys. Put the two parks side by side and the pattern is clear enough. Murchison is the stronger park for classic big-mammal game viewing and for lion in particular. Queen Elizabeth carries more species and more elephant, holds most of Uganda's hippo, and offers two things Murchison does not: primates in a forested gorge and lions that climb trees.

The one asymmetry worth stating plainly is giraffe. Murchison holds about 2,250 Nubian giraffe out of a national total of 2,519, which UWA and the Giraffe Conservation Foundation both describe as the largest population left anywhere in the wild. Queen Elizabeth has none. UWA's 2026 report handles giraffe protected area by protected area and Queen Elizabeth does not appear in the table or the text.

Read the lion row carefully, because the two figures were produced by different methods and are not directly comparable. Murchison's 240 comes from a 2022 survey. For Queen Elizabeth, UWA's 2026 report identified 93 individual lions in 22 prides in the conservation area as of 2025, and states in the same paragraph that the higher number reflects better individual identification rather than a sudden increase; a 2024 study using spatial capture-recapture put the same population below 40. What both sources agree on is direction: UWA records a 45 per cent fall in this park's lion population over five years, and names poisoning and trade in body parts among the causes. Murchison has the better odds of a lion sighting by a wide margin. Ishasha has the only lions in Uganda that routinely climb.

A note on what neither park has, since travellers ask. Zebra occur in only four Ugandan protected areas and neither of these is one of them. Cheetah and wild dog are effectively absent from both. Mountain gorillas live in Bwindi and Mgahinga, which is a separate permit and a separate journey, and Queen Elizabeth sits on the road between them and the rest of the country without having any of its own.

Species	Queen Elizabeth	Murchison Falls
Hippo	Guaranteed; over 77 per cent of Uganda's 9,026 hippos live in this conservation area	Guaranteed; continuous along the Nile, and the launch settles it
Nile crocodile	Guaranteed on the channel	Guaranteed; exceptionally large below the falls
Elephant	Very likely; Uganda's largest population, 4,711 plus or minus 1,106 on the 2018 aerial camera survey	Likely; roughly 1,000 to 1,600, best along the river
Buffalo	Guaranteed; 8,128 on the 2010 count, down from 14,858 in 2006	Guaranteed; large herds at the water
Uganda kob	Guaranteed; the commonest antelope on the Kasenyi plains	Guaranteed; around 35,000, the commonest antelope here
Nubian giraffe	Not here; absent from UWA's 2026 giraffe tables	Guaranteed; about 2,250, the largest population left in the wild
Lion	Takes luck; 93 identified in 22 prides in 2025, and 20 to 30 of them in Ishasha, where they climb	Likely; 240 in the 2022 survey, Uganda's best odds
Leopard	Takes luck; present park-wide, rarely seen	Takes luck; very high density, very low detectability
Spotted hyaena	Takes luck; present, largely nocturnal	Likely; the highest density recorded by this method in Africa
Chimpanzee	Takes luck; a tracked activity in Kyambura Gorge, from a group of roughly 20 to 30	Takes luck; only on a Kaniyo Pabidi trek, never on a game drive
Giant forest hog	Likely; UWA names it among the animals most often seen on the northern Kazinga plains	Not a species this park is known for
Topi	Takes luck; an Ishasha speciality, and the population fell from 1,521 in 2006 to 262 in 2010	Not here; Jackson's hartebeest fills the same niche
Zebra	Not here; found in only four Ugandan protected areas	Not here; same four, and this is not one of them
Cheetah and wild dog	Not here	Not here

Verdicts compiled from our own wildlife pages for both parks, September 2026, using UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026, the two General Management Plans and the peer-reviewed surveys each cites. The Queen Elizabeth elephant figure comes from an aerial camera survey flown in 2018 and published as a preprint in 2023, which is widely misdated to 2023; it came out 62 per cent above the observer-based count of about 2,900 from 2014, and its authors attribute much of that gap to the change of method. Where a species is a long shot at both parks, neither should be chosen for it.

The chimpanzee question, answered honestly

Both parks sell a chimpanzee experience and neither is the place to go if seeing chimpanzees is the point of your trip. Kibale is.

Queen Elizabeth's chimpanzees live in Kyambura Gorge, a sunken strip of forest on the eastern edge of the park. UWA's tariff prices the trek at $100 for foreign non-residents, and unlike Kibale that price excludes park entry, so the real cost is $140 with the gate fee. The group is small and it is cut off: UWA's management plan puts it at 20 in one paragraph and 21 in another, the organisation that runs the monitoring puts it at 30, and the plan records that the group was isolated in the 1990s when the corridor to Kasyoha-Kitomi and Maramagambo was settled and cleared for farming. No official or scientific source publishes a success rate, and every source agrees the odds are lower than at Kibale. The gorge itself is worth the walk whatever the animals do.

Murchison's chimpanzees are at Kaniyo Pabidi, in the Budongo forest block in the south of the conservation area, where there is a habituated group and forest guides who track it. UWA's brochure advertises the activity. UWA's tariff does not price it: the document lists chimpanzee tracking for Kibale and Kyambura only. Anyone quoting you a UWA price for Kaniyo Pabidi is quoting something that is not in the tariff, so ask who is setting and collecting the fee.

One more thing to know if you are costing this out: UWA's tariff circular of 26 February 2026 raises the chimpanzee permit to $200 from 1 January 2027.

Crowds, and the number nobody repeats

Murchison is described everywhere as Uganda's most visited park, and on the headline figure it is. UWA's last published annual report, covering July 2022 to June 2023, recorded 145,116 visitors at Murchison and 97,814 at Queen Elizabeth, against a national total of 382,285.

UWA then adds a caveat that almost nothing else on the internet carries. Thirty-eight per cent of Murchison's figure, some 54,804 people, were transit clients crossing the park on the public road rather than visiting it. Strip those out and genuine tourism visitation at Murchison was roughly 90,300, which is fewer than Queen Elizabeth's 97,814. On the numbers UWA itself publishes, Queen Elizabeth hosted more actual visitors than Murchison in that year.

There is an obvious symmetry to check and we could not check it. Queen Elizabeth also has a public tarmac highway running straight through it, crossing the channel at Katunguru, and UWA's management plan complains about traffic speeding through the heart of the protected area. Whether any of Queen Elizabeth's 97,814 were counted the same way as Murchison's transit clients is not stated in the annual report, and we found no breakdown. Treat the comparison as suggestive rather than settled.

No UWA annual report newer than 2022/23 has been published. In the field, the practical difference is distribution rather than headcount. Murchison concentrates its visitors on the Buligi circuit and the launch; Queen Elizabeth spreads them across five sectors that are hours apart, so Ishasha in particular can feel very quiet even in a busy month.

Seasons: one park has a dry season, the other barely does

Neither park closes. Gates run from 07:00 to 19:00 all year at both.

Murchison has a recognisable dry season. December to February is the long one, with 28 mm in January and 41 mm in February on the 1991 to 2020 normals, and June offers a shallow second dip. October is the wettest month at 234 mm across 20 rain days.

Queen Elizabeth is wetter and its pattern is more broken up. It has two rainfall peaks, April at 339 mm over 18 rain days and October at 241 mm, and its reliable dry window is short: June with 18 mm across a single rain day and July with 24 mm, again across one. January and February give a second, slightly damper window at 32 mm and 36 mm. There is no month here with no rain at all.

If you can only travel in one window and you want both parks in the same trip, June and July line up: it is prime at Queen Elizabeth and the shoulder-to-prime dip at Murchison. December to February works well at Murchison and reasonably at Queen Elizabeth. March, April, May and November are the months to avoid at both, and not only for the rain: that is also when Aerolink drops most of its frequencies to both parks, and when Queen Elizabeth's unpaved sector roads are at their worst.

Doing both, which is what most people should do

This is the part that separates this comparison from our Murchison and Kidepo page, where the honest answer is that the two do not fit in one trip. These two do.

Routing the real road network gives 440 km and about seven and a half hours of free-flow driving between Paraa and Mweya, which in practice means a long day with a stop in the middle. Nobody drives it in one go, and nobody needs to. The standard western Uganda circuit runs Kampala, Murchison Falls, Fort Portal, Kibale, Queen Elizabeth and then Bwindi. Kibale sits on the road between the two parks and solves the chimpanzee question that neither of them answers well.

If you have seven to ten days, do both and put Kibale in the middle. If you have four or five, pick one. If you are picking, the sorting below is how we would do it.

Pick Murchison Falls if this is your first Uganda safari and you want the shortest drive, the densest concentration of large animals and a boat trip with a waterfall at the end of it.
Pick Murchison Falls if giraffe matter to you. It holds the largest population of Nubian giraffe left in the wild and Queen Elizabeth has none.
Pick Murchison Falls if you want the best chance of lions in Uganda, or if shoebill is on your list, since UWA names its delta as the best place in the country to look for one.
Pick Queen Elizabeth if you want range in one park: elephant on the plains, hippo on the channel, primates in a forest gorge, tree-climbing lions in a sector three hours south, and a bird list over 600 species long.
Pick Queen Elizabeth if it fits your route. It sits on the road between Kibale and Bwindi, so on a gorilla-and-chimpanzee trip it costs you almost no detour, while Murchison is a dedicated leg north.
Pick Queen Elizabeth if the park fees matter at the margin. A standard day runs about $48 here against $60 at Murchison, though the gap is small next to what you will spend on beds and fuel.
Pick Queen Elizabeth if you are travelling in June or July and want the driest, most reliable window either park offers.
Do not pick either one for chimpanzees alone. Kibale sits on the northern road into Queen Elizabeth and does that job properly.