Seven L.A. County Pumpkin Patches, Ranked. The Most Expensive Gate Includes Nothing.

One test decides the order: what it costs to walk in before you touch a pumpkin, and what that money includes.

The cheapest pumpkin patch in Los Angeles County costs nothing to walk into and won’t tell you what anything inside it costs. The most expensive one charges $25 on an October Saturday, and what the $25 buys is stated on its own admissions page in five words: “entry to the patch only.” Somewhere between those two is a $19.99 ticket in Pomona that covers a cow train, the corn mazes, a hay wagon and a petting farm, which is the closest thing this county has to a straight answer.

We read the posted 2026 rates, ticket stores, FAQs and hours pages of Los Angeles County’s pumpkin patches on September 19, 2026, and ranked seven of them on one question: what does it cost to walk in, and what does walking in include? Not the pumpkin, which every lot prices its own way. The gate — and, where a patch posts one, the price list behind it.

The order is not the price. If it were, the free lots would take the top and the argument would be over in a sentence. The order is what the money buys, and by that measure the most expensive advance ticket in the county finishes first and the famous lot on Jefferson Boulevard finishes last.

1. Cal Poly Pomona PumpkinFest, Pomona — $18 online, $22 at the gate, and the only ticket here that includes the rides

Here is the placement worth arguing about, so we’ll defend it with arithmetic instead of adjectives. PumpkinFest runs weekends only, October 10 through 31, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and its ticket store lists one adult line — “Weekend General Admission | Gate Price $22” — at $18 bought online, with a $1.99 fee attached to each ticket and a $5 parking pass carrying a $1 fee of its own. A family four-pack runs $15 a ticket, online only, described on the same page as saving $3 per ticket.

What the $18 covers is the reason it wins: Pumpkin Hill, the corn mazes, the sunflower maze, the cow train, the hay wagon ride, the petting farm, the Jr. Farmers Discovery Zone, live music and farm demonstrations, with the university’s page stating the two exclusions plainly — pumpkins and petting-farm feed. Children under 2 get in free. One adult and one child, bought online with parking, is $45.98 all in, and nobody pays for a ride after that.

It also has the only free door in this ranking that isn’t a patch gate: the Farm Store opens 7 to 10 a.m. on festival weekends for people who only want to shop, and after 10 a.m. the university says paid admission and a wristband are required to shop it. The catch is the calendar. Capacity is capped each day, the page says the festival usually sells out, and gate sales close at 6 p.m. on a 7 p.m. night.

2. Shawn’s Pumpkin Patch, Culver City — $4 in, $2 back, and a new address

Shawn’s posts the rarest thing on this page: a complete price list. The gate is $4 for adults and children 12 and over, and it includes a $2 voucher toward a pumpkin, which makes the real cost of admission two dollars and a walk to the register. The patch also moved for this season: the same page gives an opening date of Saturday, October 3, 2026, and a new address at 6229 Bristol Parkway.

Everything inside is à la carte and published to the dollar: $5 each for the giant slides, the bounce house, the train ride, the carnival games, Playland and the petting zoo, $1 a cup for animal food, $10 for a pony ride on Thursdays through Sundays with an 80-pound weight limit, $15 for the bungee trampoline, face painting from $5. An adult and a kid who ride three things leave $23 at the window and take $4 of it home in pumpkin credit.

Second place, not first, for a boring reason: three rides at Shawn’s costs more than the entire Pomona ticket, and the fourth ride is where the gap stops being close.

3. Mr. Jack O’Lanterns, West Los Angeles and Torrance — free at the gate, free in the lot, silent about the rest

The answer to the only question most people have is one line in this operator’s FAQ: “Admission is FREE at all locations.” The patches run October 2 through November 1 at 11404 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Los Angeles and 17520 Prairie Ave. in Torrance, and the same page promises free parking at every location, which in this county is worth saying twice. The city of Torrance publishes the Prairie Avenue hours: noon to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday.

Third and not higher because free entry is only half a price. Ask the FAQ what a pumpkin costs and it answers that each size is priced differently and invites you to come see, and there is no posted number for a single activity ticket anywhere on the site. A free gate you can’t budget behind is still a better deal than a $25 one; it just isn’t a plan.

4. Forneris Farms, Mission Hills — an actual farm, free parking, cash only, and no corn maze this year

Forneris is the one entry here that grows things for a living the rest of the year, at 15200 Rinaldi St. in Mission Hills. It is also, this fall, a farm without the thing an asphalt lot can’t fake. Its own site says so in capital letters: “NO Corn Maze for 2026.”

The rest of the farm’s terms are unusually blunt and worth knowing before you turn off Rinaldi: October hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., parking is free, and payment is cash — “We only accept CASH for payment,” with no card line and no app. The patch page notes that you can shop the farm market for décor, squash and produce without an entry fee, which implies the patch itself has one, and nowhere on the site does the farm say what that fee is.

Fourth is a farm marked down for making you drive to Rinaldi Street to learn the price, in a year when the attraction that justified the drive isn’t running.

5. Lopez Ranch, Marina del Rey — free admission, Venmo accepted, no rides claimed

The Villa Marina Marketplace lot fills up with pumpkins from October 3 through October 31, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays, with free admission and payment by cash, Venmo or Zelle. The listing sells the patch on what it actually is — pumpkins, straw and photo spots, across from the Coffee Bean — and doesn’t pretend there is a midway behind it.

That honesty is why it outranks the two entries below it and why it can’t reach the three above. On the Westside, a free lot that takes Venmo and closes at 8 is a fine Tuesday. It is not a Saturday with a seven-year-old.

6. DeLuca Farm, San Pedro — opens October 3, posts no gate, sells until it’s out

The San Pedro lot at 903 S. Western Ave. states its season in one sentence on its own site: open for pumpkins and Halloween decorations from October 3 “until the week of Halloween or until we sell out.” Hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends, a twelve-hour Saturday.

Sixth because the page is built for the Christmas tree business the same family runs there, and the pumpkin half of the year gets a paragraph, an address and no prices at all. The sell-out clause is the part to take seriously: this is the only entry here that tells you the season can end early.

7. Mr. Bones Pumpkin Patch, Culver City — $10 on opening day, $25 on the third Saturday, and it includes nothing

Mr. Bones has been doing this since 1987, per its own site, and it is the only patch in the county that prices itself like an airline. Its 2026 admissions table runs the season October 2 through 31 and moves the price by the hour: $10 on opening day, $12 on every weekday after it, $15 on Halloween, $20 if you arrive at 9 a.m. on October 17, and $25 if you arrive at 11 a.m. the same morning. Everyone 3 and older pays; seniors, active military and first responders get $2 off with identification.

Then the line that decides the ranking, printed under the table: “Admission prices include entry to the patch only,” and “Activities have separate hours and prices.” Those activities are $1 a ticket, or 10 for $9, 20 for $17 and 40 for $33, with an Ultimate Kids Pass at $30 covering unlimited bounce houses, the straw maze, the super slide and the petting zoo — and excluding face painting, pumpkin decorating and pony rides. An adult and a child arriving at 11 a.m. on October 17 with that pass are at $80 before a pumpkin.

The fair objection: weekday visitors get $5 in Pumpkin Bucks with paid admission, and on weekends the adult gets the $5 while the child gets five activity tickets. Read the fine print, though — the patch says Pumpkin Bucks can only be spent on one of its own pumpkins, so a $12 Tuesday is $12 and a discount on a pumpkin you came to buy. Take all of it at face value and the Saturday math still lands at $75 against $45.98 in Pomona, where the cow train is included and the parking is $5. Last place isn’t about the patch. It’s about a $25 gate that opens onto a price list.

One more thing this table does, and it is the reason a dated price ranking exists: it moves. We read it on September 19 and again on September 25, and in six days the weekday gate went from $10 to $12, the second Saturday’s late slot came down a dollar to $22, and the last weekend of October dropped from $20 and $25 to $18 and $23. Nothing announced any of it. The ticket still includes entry to the patch.

The one everybody drives to is in Ventura County

Underwood Family Farms isn’t on this list because Moorpark isn’t in Los Angeles County, and it belongs in the piece anyway because it’s the number Angelenos actually compare against. Its Fall Harvest Festival runs September 26 through October 31, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., at $16 weekday general admission bought at the gate only. Weekends are a different animal: $25 presale for the first two, then $34 regular and $38 day-of for the peak weekends and Halloween itself, with parking free, a $2 discount for seniors, military, veterans and first responders, and gem mining, train rides, horse-drawn wagons and face painting charged on top of the ticket.

Two adults driving out on the last Saturday of October pay $68 to $76 at the gate, before the gem mining, the train and the horse-drawn wagon. That is the ticket the $45.98 afternoon in Pomona is competing with.

Three we left out, and why

Tapia Bros. Farm in Encino is the omission that hurts, because it’s a genuine working farm with a corn maze and a farm stand on Hayvenhurst. Time Out’s listing puts admission at $3 with pony rides at $8 and a train at $5, but the hours on that listing are last fall’s and the farm publishes no 2026 page of its own that we could read. A price we can’t confirm isn’t a rank we can defend.

Pa’s Pumpkin Patch, now at Lakewood Center, sits behind a bot check that wouldn’t serve its own ticket page to us this week, and the 2026 listing we could read gives dates of October 1 through 31 and no prices. The Toluca Lake Pumpkin Festival’s most recent published write-up is from the 2025 season. Both are worth your Saturday; neither is rankable today.

The night events are a separate county entirely — the carved-pumpkin trails at Descanso Gardens and the South Coast Botanic Garden charge $29 and up, and we ranked eight of those on their own page on September 10.

What the ranking is actually measuring

Put the seven gates in a row and the spread — $0 to $25 — turns out to be the least useful number on the page. The useful one is how far the gate sits from the thing you came for. In Pomona the distance is zero, because the ticket contains the rides. At Shawn’s it’s $5 a ride and the list is public. At Mr. Bones it’s $30 for a wristband a $25 ticket didn’t include. At Forneris and DeLuca the distance is unmeasurable, because neither posts a number at all.

The other pattern is what a pumpkin patch in this county now is. Five of the seven are lots — shopping-center asphalt, boulevard frontage, a Christmas tree business in its off-season — rented for four weeks and dressed in straw. The two on working farmland are Forneris in Mission Hills and Cal Poly’s Kellogg Ranch in Pomona, and one of them has no corn maze this year. If you want the agricultural version of October, the drive is to Moorpark and the ticket is $34.

If you want the cheap version, it’s a $4 gate on Bristol Parkway that hands $2 back, and it opens October 3.