If you’ve driven along Highway 151 near Verona and caught a glimpse of a bright red barn, a castle turret, or something that looks suspiciously like a giant chocolate factory, you weren’t imagining it. That’s Epic Systems — one of the world’s largest health records software companies (they created MyChart) — and its headquarters is unlike any corporate campus in the country. Spread across more than a thousand acres of former farmland, Epic’s offices are built as a series of elaborately themed “campuses,” each designed around a different fictional world. There’s a working farm. An underground auditorium that seats more people than most arenas. And two campuses in particular that have made the Epic Systems tour into one of the most talked-about free things to do in southern Wisconsin (more on those below).
The Epic Systems campus tour is free, self-guided, and open to the public — but it’s also one of the hardest reservations in the Madison area to actually land. Here’s everything to know before you go, including how to get a slot in the first place.
What you’ll see on a tour of Epic Systems
Epic offers free, self-guided public tours of its Verona headquarters. You reserve a time slot online, show up, pick up a printed tour packet at the front desk, and then walk the route on your own — no guide, no group leader, just you, the packet, and a campus that looks like six different movie sets stitched together. Epic describes six distinct campuses available to explore: Prairie, Central Park, Farm, Learning, Wizards Academy, and Storybook. Each individual campus tour takes roughly an hour, and getting to some of them means passing through others — the Storybook and Wizards Academy tours both route you through Central Park Campus first.
Given the walking involved, most visitors pick two or three campuses rather than trying to see all six in one visit — and the friendly visitor center staff will suggest this limitation as well. If you only have time for two Epic campuses, make them Wizards Academy and Storybook. They’re the most visually dense, the most photographed, and the ones that make the whole trip feel like you accidentally wandered onto a movie backlot (rather than the offices of a medical software company).
Wizards Academy Campus
This is Epic’s Harry Potter campus, and the company does not undersell the theme. You enter through a cafeteria built to resemble London’s King’s Cross Station — the visual gateway into the rest of the campus — before making your way through a series of buildings that lean fully into the wizarding-world aesthetic:
- A Diagon Alley recreation running between office buildings, styled after the crooked shopping street from the films
- The Great Hall, a bright, skylit space that serves as the tour’s grand finale on this campus
- A library building with an elaborate spiral staircase
- The Observatory and Classroom buildings, connected by the “Dementor Tunnel” — a deliberately dim, slightly unsettling passage between spaces
- The Fortress, home to a sleeping dragon sculpture you’ll come face to face with before escaping its lair
- Conference rooms styled as wizarding-world classrooms, complete with large portraits (past visitors have spotted ones resembling Dumbledore and Sirius Black)
- A giant chess set among the details scattered throughout
Wizards Academy is Epic’s newest fully built-out themed campus, and it shows — the detail level is a step up even from Epic’s other elaborate buildings.
Storybook Campus
If Wizards Academy is one story taken very seriously, Storybook Campus is several stories taken very seriously at once. Truly, one whole trip to Epic could be dedicated to the Storybook campus. Each building here is designed around a different classic tale, and the buildings have distinct exterior themes tied to specific authors and stories: an Alice in Wonderland building, an Oz building, a Chocolate Factory building (complete with a faux chimney and a chocolate waterfall inside), a Brothers Grimm building, and a Jules Verne building, with newer additions named Mystery and Castaway rounding out the campus.
Highlights on this route include:
- A yellow brick road winding through the Oz building’s hallways, done up in emerald green
- A “Rabbit Hole” slide and an upside-down house interior in the Alice building
- Giant playing-card guards and a grinning Cheshire cat peering through a window
- The chocolate waterfall and oversized candy details inside the Chocolate Factory building
- The Grimm building’s gingerbread house conference room, guarded outside by a wolf dressed in Grandmother’s clothing, with a Rapunzel-themed stairwell where her hair cascades down the center
Both campuses route through Central Park Campus on the way, which has its own themed stretches worth slowing down for — a Dungeons & Dragons–inspired building called Isis, a Wild West–themed building called Juno, and a starlit tunnel through a building called Heaven.
Deep Space: a truly Epic auditorium
For some, the most impressive thing on Epic’s campus isn’t visible from outside at all. Deep Space is an underground auditorium built into a hillside, seating 11,400 people — large enough to fit a football field inside, with no support columns blocking any seat’s view of the stage. It’s believed to be the largest sub-surface auditorium in the world. Epic built it to host its massive annual Users Group Meeting and monthly all-staff meetings, and it’s often included as a stop on tour routes near Central Park Campus. Seeing a space this size that’s completely buried under a green roof is genuinely disorienting in the best way.
How to book a tour at Epic Systems
This is the hard part. Epic tours are free, but slots are limited and demand is high — this is one of the most in-demand free attractions in the Madison area. A few things to know:
- Book through epic.com’s tour scheduler. Reservations are required; walk-ins without a booking can sometimes get squeezed into open slots, but you shouldn’t count on it. Book your Epic tour here
- Group sizes are capped. Weekday tours are limited to seven people or fewer; weekend tours allow up to twelve.
- Tour hours are set and fairly narrow: weekends 10 a.m.–3 p.m., weekdays 2–5 p.m.
- Epic closes tours for stretches around its major events — most notably a multi-week closure around its late-summer Users Group Meeting — so check the calendar before you plan a trip.
The real trick to landing a slot: camp out on the calendar for the date you want and keep refreshing. This is best done on a desktop, rather than your phone: you can see a whole week of slots at a time, and you’ll be able to register your name / email / party size more quickly with a keyboard. Cancellations open up spots constantly, but they get grabbed again quickly, often within seconds. If you have a specific weekend in mind, check back repeatedly in the days leading up to it — persistence is genuinely the strategy here, not a booking hack you’re missing.
Hail-Mary move for booking an Epic Systems tour
If you strike out entirely and the calendar shows nothing, there’s one more move worth trying — but it only works for small groups, not a party of ten. Call Epic’s main line at (608) 271-9000. The people who answer are genuinely friendly, and it’s worth being straightforward: tell them you checked online and found nothing open, and that you’re only in town for a limited window. Ask if you could at least come look around the outdoor areas.
With a little luck, they’ll say yes. Commit to actually doing this — it’s worth it even on its own, though seeing the grounds from outside is nowhere close to seeing the upside-down room in the Alice in Wonderland building. When you arrive, check in at the visitor center like normal, mention that you called ahead, and ask for guidance on where to walk outside. Then, once you’ve got a person in front of you, take your shot: “Or… I don’t suppose any slots have opened up for indoors?”
If a staff member takes pity on you, you’re in — and since the tours are self-guided, the only limit at that point is how much ground you can cover before you run out of steam. The campus is truly sprawling.
Insider’s tip: go on a weekend
Epic’s tour route runs directly past working offices and conference rooms, and on weekdays, those spaces are occupied by actual Epic employees doing actual work. You’ll walk past people at their desks, and it’s about as awkward as it sounds — most won’t make eye contact or acknowledge you, because to them you’re not part of an attraction; you’re a stranger walking through their workplace. Some of the more elaborate conference rooms on the tour route are also in active use for meetings during the week, which means you may not get to see them at all.
On weekends, the offices are empty, the themed conference rooms are open and unoccupied, and you can actually slow down and take everything in without feeling like you’ve wandered into someone’s Tuesday. Weekend tours also allow larger groups. There’s really no contest here — if you can choose, choose the weekend.
Practical tips for your Epic Systems tour visit
- Address: 1979 Milky Way, Verona, WI 53593 — about 11 miles southwest of Madison, and roughly a 20-mile, half-hour drive northwest from Stoughton.
- Wear real walking shoes. The campuses are large and connected by long hallways and skyways; a two-campus visit adds up to real mileage.
- The cafeterias are staff-only. You can’t buy food or drinks on campus as a visitor, so eat before you go or bring snacks.
- Photos are fine for personal use; professional photoshoots (including headshots) require advance permission from Epic.
- Park in the visitor lot, marked and located under the solar panels, and follow the posted visitor signage from there.
- Stay indoors for your tour. Epic Systems tours are entirely indoors: all the campuses are connected through a charming series of climate-controlled tunnels and skyways. If you accidentally step outside during a weekend tour, the door will lock behind you. And with minimal staff on site, you may not find anyone to let you back in!
Make a day of it from Stoughton
Epic is about a half-hour drive from Stoughton, which makes it an easy add-on to a weekend built around Stoughton’s own Norwegian heritage sites, downtown shops, and the Stoughton Opera House. Book your Epic tour for a Saturday or Sunday morning, spend the afternoon in Stoughton, take in an evening concert, and you’ve got a full day that covers two of the more distinctive things going on in this part of Wisconsin.
