Default to taking your shoes off at the door when visiting someone’s home. If your host is clearly not doing this themselves or tells you it’s fine to keep them on, follow their lead, this varies more by household (and how urban the area is) than most of the customs on this list.
Stay in the areas you’ve been shown or invited into, the living room, dining area, wherever the visit is actually happening, rather than wandering into other parts of the house out of curiosity. Much of the home is implicitly off-limits to guests even during a welcoming visit.
- When in doubt, ask rather than assume — “should I take my shoes off?” is a completely normal question to ask a host directly, nobody will think less of you for checking.
- This holds even with close friends’ homes, not just formal visits — the boundary is about the home’s private areas, not about how well you know the host.