It’s been a season of roller coaster crowds at Walt Disney World–high highs followed by low lows–a trend that’ll continue with the arrival of more holiday weekends and school breaks this winter. This wait times report shares data for the last month and year-over-year comparisons, plus our theories as to what’s happening with attendance & lines–and why wait times are getting worse at painting a complete picture of crowds.
One thing these crowd reports no longer need to do is offer a long preface to help explain their strengths and limitations, or addressing misconceptions about crowds. That’s because I’ve kicked that out to its own list of the “Top” 10 Ways Walt Disney World Fans Are Wrong About Crowds. That’s worth reading if you want a better understanding of WDW attendance patterns, feels like crowds vs. wait times, and a few fairly easy ways to “beat” the crowds.
That means we can dig right in and quickly recap the holiday season. Christmas is now officially in the books, with Magic Kingdom taking down its decor and turning off the music as of yesterday (January 15). That makes it a good time to do a post-mortem on crowds. Wait times for Walt Disney World as a whole were down noticeably on a year-over-year basis from mid-November through mid-January. This doesn’t mean there weren’t 9/10 or 10/10 crowd level days–there absolutely were–so let’s break down what it does mean…
Jersey Week through Veterans Day saw a slight spike to moderate territory, with crowds plummeting the week after to lows rivaling their August and September lows. I was in the parks for most of this time, and my anecdotal perception was that it wasn’t too bad. Even the busiest stretch wasn’t bad, especially when it came to Lightning Lane or strategy testing. That little less than a week before Thanksgiving week is one to target in 2025.
Unsurprisingly, Thanksgiving week was the busiest of November with crowds arriving the Sunday before, peaking on Monday, and continuing until Thursday. By Friday, the sharp downtrend had already begun. But even at its height, Thanksgiving week was not truly busy. Crowd levels, at least as measured by wait times, ended up being moderate. (As always, congestion is a different story.)
That along with the first two weeks of December all ended up having low crowd levels. During the first 3 weeks of December, average wait times across the entirety of Walt Disney World ranged from 26 to 29 minutes. Those are exceptionally good crowd levels, and lower than last year (which was lower than the previous year, too).
Most surprisingly, wait times dropped each week, making our favorite week of the entire year at Walt Disney World the “busiest” of the bunch. We’re still talking low levels, but usually each week of December gets progressively busier.
My best guess is that higher prices are having a deterrent effect on attendance outside of holiday windows (meaning guests who aren’t beholden to school breaks are more inclined to comparison shop dates based on price), and that is something worth keeping in mind. With revenge travel firmly in the rearview mirror, many consumers are becoming more cost-conscious and less free spending. (This could explain a lot of other trends we’ve observed lately.)
What came next showed the limitation of higher prices having a deterrent effect on attendance during school breaks. The week of Christmas had a 46 minute average wait time–20 minutes higher than the week immediately before it–for a 9/10 crowd level that was enough to make it the busiest week since Easter.
The week encompassing New Year’s Eve had a 50 minute average for 10/10 crowd levels, making it, once again, the busiest of the year at Walt Disney World. Hardly a surprise, as the week of NYE is consistently the worst of the year. (Note that both holidays fell on Wednesdays, so those weeks actually included days before and after each.)
Also unsurprising is that crowds have dropped since then. Last week had a 33 minute average for 4/10 crowds, and this week-to-date is sitting at 25 minutes for 1/10 crowd levels. These trends are more or less what you’d expect, but that still doesn’t even begin to tell the full story. We’ll cover what this means and, perhaps more importantly, what it doesn’t mean, below.
First, here’s a look at weekly wait time trends courtesy of thrill-data.com just to put this all into perspective:
This shows weekly wait time data dating back to 2019. The left peak is that Christmas and New Year’s Eve, from before the world went sideways (hence the gap for a couple months in 2020). Then there’s a bunch of useless data from mid-2020 and 2021, followed by similar peaks on the other half for the last three years.
The week in the lead-up to New Year’s Eve in late 2023 is the tallest line on that graph (barely), with an average wait time of 61 minutes. That’s 11 minutes busier than the comparable week in 2024. But again, there isn’t really a completely comparable week. December 31, 2023 was a Sunday, meaning that was a full week for the purposes of these timeframes. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
Nevertheless, 2023’s week leading up to New Year’s Eve was the busiest single week at Walt Disney World since the same week in late 2019 into early 2020. This is particularly notable because 2023 was otherwise a slower year than 2022. We’ve been talking about the exhaustion of pent-up demand for a while, but it actually started last year with most weeks being slower than 2022. The week of New Year’s Eve was the rare–and significant–exception to that.
Even without apples to apples comparisons, you can plainly see this gradual weekly downtrend from 2022 highs to 2023 and 2024. It’s probably more difficult to discern, but 2019 wait times sit just below 2022. It bears emphasizing that wait times are not a proxy for park attendance. There are so many things that impact posted wait times data and make annual comparisons from 2019 to now pointless (free FastPass+ vs. paid Lightning Lanes, and the utilization of each being one biggie). But we’re getting ahead of ourselves–more along these lines below.
Here’s a look at daily wait times over the course of the last year:
The far left starts with mid-January 2024, and the far right is mid-January 2025. Obviously, all the days in between are in between.
Look at the far left side. The first big spike there is Presidents’ Day, then early Spring Break, followed by Easter. What’s most noticeable, I think, is how largely elevated those days are as compared to the post-Easter drop-off in early April. This is precisely what prompted us to write Winter (Still) Is Not Off-Season at Walt Disney World last year. After almost a full year of declining wait times (versus the same months in the prior year), January through March 2024 saw wait times increase.
It didn’t last. Those who follow crowd patterns need no reminder, but last summer’s “performance” revived commentary that Summer (Still) Is NOT High Crowds Season at Walt Disney World, with other sites even claiming it’s now off-season. It isn’t, as should be obvious by the extended sea of green starting in late August.
Now in fairness, there were two hurricanes that together cost Walt Disney World $130 million in lost revenue. Even at Disney prices, that amounts to a lot of cancellations, explaining why late September through the first few weeks of October were artificially depressed. Fall break still saw a comparative spike, but not nearly to the extent as normal–or it would’ve but for the hurricanes.
Nevertheless, the lower wait times persisted into parts of November and December, and there’s no weather to explain those away. Equally as significant, this year’s wait times fell off a cliff on January 12, 2025 to levels far below the same dates last year. So the big question becomes…are there any different ways to explain this away?
Yes, at least to some extent. Frankly, there must be, as Disney hasn’t reported a steep drop off in attendance on its earnings calls. They did warn investors of attendance softness and demand moderation through 2025 during one earnings call earlier in the year. However, the most recent quarter saw “comparable” visitor numbers to the prior-year quarter, suggesting attendance was flat or only down slightly.
By contrast, Walt Disney World’s wait times do show a steep drop, more like 10%. This came as quarterly revenue increased, and annual revenue reached a new record, up by 5% versus the prior year. That’s not just Walt Disney World, though; it also includes Disneyland and the international parks, as well as (perhaps most notably) Disney Cruise Line. So not much can be gleaned from that.
This comes at the same time when Universal reported revenue for its theme parks division down 5.3% on lighter attendance (to an unknown degree). The difference is that Universal opened Super Nintendo World in Hollywood in early 2023, and saw a sharp drop-off last year after that. In Orlando, fans have been postponing visits in the lead-up to Epic Universe. Not much we can surmise about Walt Disney World attendance from any of this.
In our view, the single biggest explanation for the drop in wait times is that Walt Disney World made major changes to its queueing policies in mid-2024. Wait times haven’t been as high since–even on comparably congested days.
We explained this in Here’s Why Standby Lines and Lightning Lanes Are Moving Faster at Walt Disney World and have discussed it elsewhere. That’s really worth reading if you want to understand the growing disconnect between ‘feels like’ crowds and wait times.
During our holiday season visits to EPCOT, in particular, we really felt this. Even on random weekdays during one of the quieter weeks of December, congestion was high. If you were just walking around enjoying the atmosphere, as many guests were clearly doing, you would’ve perceived what felt like 10/10 crowd levels. Wait times, on the other hand, reflected crowd levels of around 4/10 to 6/10 on those days.
It was a similar story in Magic Kingdom, especially in the evenings on non-party dates. Those certainly feel like they’re getting worse, to the point that I’d hazard a guess that Walt Disney World’s experiment in offering free Park Hoppers–almost certainly done to normalize attendance during party season–backfired and made Magic Kingdom busier on dates it was open later.
We’ve discussed all of this several times over the last couple of months, but it all bears reiterating as Winter 2025 heats up. EPCOT’s Festival of the Arts starts tomorrow (January 17, 2025), and this annual event has become a fan-favorite that’s a big draw for locals and tourists alike.
This weekend is a holiday weekend, so it’d likely see a spike in attendance regardless, but we’re anticipating that will be sustained. Just as we wrote last year, winter still isn’t off-season–and that’s still (still still) the case even if attraction wait times suggest otherwise.
Ultimately, this does present us with something of a dilemma in how to discuss wait times and crowds going forward.
Wait times are used as a proxy for crowd levels because they are the only objective measure for that. There’s literally no alternative–even if someone had endless resources and could employ 8 researchers to be in the parks every single day from opening until close, that would still be too anecdotal to be of value. And at the end of the day, wait times still are what’s important to most planners, even if congestion can leave an outsized impression.
It nevertheless bears strongly underscoring this growing disconnect between wait times and congestion or feels like crowds. We can only assume that wait times will continue to be down significantly year-over-year due to the aforementioned queueing policy changes and postponed visits in the lead-up to Epic Universe (and Disney Starlight Night Parade), but only the latter impacts attendance. Those policy changes will continue to make for difficult year-over-year wait time comparisons until around Summer 2025, which is right around the time attendance could also see a boost due to the new additions. That might make for a double-whammy where the numbers go from appearing down significantly year-over-year to up by similar margins.
All of this is my way of saying to not take wait times and crowd level reporting too seriously right now, at least when it comes to year-over-year comparisons. This site and others are going to continue sharing the the data is trending downwards. That’s true. But it’s always been the case that wait times presented an incomplete picture of crowds. Now it’s really true, to the point that you might be disappointed or surprised if you just look at the stats and are expecting the parks to be ghost towns during your visit. Attendance might be down slightly, but it won’t be to nearly that degree.
To the contrary, all it takes for even heavier feels like crowds year-over-year is more locals and fans in the parks as opposed to first-timers. The former groups are more likely to wander around and do things other than attractions, whereas the latter focus more on rides. And this might very well happen if more APs are in circulation, ticket deals prove popular, or first-timers balk at the cost of Disney vacations. That’s to say nothing of reduced capacity as a result of refurbishments, closures and construction. The bottom line is that there are a lot of variables that contribute to congestion or feels like crowds, and wait times are only one piece of the puzzle.
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think of wait time and crowd trends over the course of the last 6-7 months, but especially during the recent holiday season and Winter 2025? Expect ‘feels like’ crowds to be heavy over the next couple of months, even if the wait times suggest a slowdown? Any other crowd considerations we failed to take into account or details we missed/got wrong? Do you agree or disagree with my assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
