Shortly after sharing our list of the Best & Worst Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World in 2025 & 2026, I started working on the same thing for Disneyland and Disney California Adventure. Not since the most recent update–since it was first published. That was roughly 18 months ago and I’m still not even close to finished.
It’s a resource we really like and, to be honest, think is better than typical crowd calendars. It’s the type of thing we share with family and friends when they ask questions about choosing dates. We’ve been trying to do more like that, such as our list of the Best 24 Restaurants at Disneyland. I’ve also been toying with one for hotels in Anaheim that just shares where we stay most often for fun now that we have a baby. But I digress.
The reason such a list of the Best & Worst Weeks to Visit Disneyland in 2025 & 2026 has not yet come to fruition is because California crowds have not yet “settled down” to the same extent as Florida patterns. Well, they did briefly this year. Not to pre-closure norms, but close enough that I was comfortable with qualitative week recommendations, and was on track to finally publish the list last week. But now, it’s back to the drawing board…
If you’ve already read the latest update to our 2025 Disneyland Crowd Calendar, you already know where this is going. In case not, Disneyland crowds are probably going to become unpredictable over the course of the next 18 months, to the point that we’d caution against over-reliance on any crowd calendars, ours included.
The purpose of this post is to walk you through my thinking about how Disneyland crowds could play out in 2025, discussing the unique circumstances for this year, and trying to draw some semblance of conclusions. Fair warning: this is a thinking-out-loud exercise, offering my insight and rationales, but not definitive conclusions. With that, let’s dig into the factors.
First, the 2025 Southern California Resident Disneyland Ticket Deal is much better than last year, seeing a very rare price decrease–and a massive one. In a normal year, the superior savings would entice locals who haven’t visited in a while or got priced out of Annual Passes to make a return.
On top of that, there’s also the recently-announced Disneyland kids ticket offer for 2025, which is available for all families–tourists and residents of Southern California alike. This offers kids admission for $50 per day between January 7 and March 20, 2025.
These deals would normally be a strong signal for higher crowds. The same kids ticket deal was offered last year, and it was tremendously popular. The stretch starting with President’s Day and Ski Week had 8/10 and 7/10 crowd levels, and the final week of the promotion had a 9/10 crowd level and is the #3 worst week of the year (for now). Anecdotally, we saw a noticeable increase in strollers and families around the parks during the final few weeks of the promotion.
Second, there’s the Disneyland 70th Anniversary Celebration, which runs May 16, 2025 through Summer 2026. Here’s a rundown of what’s debuting or returning in 2025 for this 18-month event:
World of Color: Happiness
Paint the Night Parade
Wondrous Journeys Fireworks
Better Together: A Pixar Pals Celebration!
Head over to our Guide to the Disneyland 70th Anniversary Celebration to read even more detail about what’s to come for the huge celebration. We have full details about all of that, plus the new Walt Disney – A Magical Life stage show that’ll debut for Summer 2025, and more!
Disneyland’s 70th Anniversary also should be a strong signal for significantly higher crowds starting that date. In a normal year, tourists and locals who visit infrequently would postpone their park days until the celebration started.
However, these two “strong signals” of higher crowds are in direct conflict with one another. Want to guess when the SoCal resident deal ends? May 15, 2025. Literally the day before the 70th kicks off. It’s a really savvy move by Disneyland, but one that wrecks crowd calendars.
So on the one hand, there’s an aggressive ticket deal to start the year that could induce visits. On the other hand, there’s a reason why this deal is much more aggressive than normal. Disneyland fans and even casual Southern California visitors (and certainly out-of-state tourists) might want to delay visits until May 16, 2025 and later, even if it’s more expensive to do so.
The bottom line is that there are countervailing factors, and they’re two huge ones that would normally have outsized impacts and be bullish signs for larger crowds. It’s possible that’s true this year, too, and that the ticket deals draw bargain hunters and the Disneyland 70th Anniversary draws a separate audience of Annual Passholders (who already paid for their admission) along with celebration enthusiasts.
Frankly, this is what I’d normally predict–that Disneyland would simply see heavier crowds as it draws from two distinct pools of guests. In 2025, I’m less inclined to believe that will be the case. That would require a year-over-year increase in attendance, and that’s a bold bet as pent-up demand has burning out.
When thinking about the range of outcomes, I’m reminded of early 2015, which not-so-coincidentally was a decade ago. In the lead-up to Disneyland’s 60th Anniversary, the company basically threw the towel in on the first several months of the year.
Sleeping Beauty Castle was behind scrims for much of the winter and the moat was drained. As Disney did infrastructure work to prepare for the new Disneyland Forever fireworks, the park presented the much shorter and old school “Fantasy in the Sky” fireworks.
There were easily a half-dozen “important” attractions in each park that were down, from the normal winter closures of water rides to uninstalling seasonal overlays to doing other plussing at Fantasyland dark rides, as that was one of the marketing points of the Diamond Celebration.
There were also a bunch of placemaking projects, including the conversion of Condor Flats to Grizzly Peak Airfield (closing off a large section of the front of DCA). If I recall correctly, there were no nighttime spectaculars (aside from “Fantasy in the Sky”) presented in either park.
What I do remember were the complaints on social media. People would post photos of the scrims or list of ‘temporarily unavailable’ attractions posted outside ticket booths, and bemoan the fact that Disney was charging full price for admission. Almost all of whom were locals with Annual Passes, but they nevertheless had a point.
What I also remember is how amazing this was. The parks were absolutely dead. Not just light crowds, but dead dead, with attendance more like the post-reopening period at Walt Disney World in 2020, long before “revenge travel” was a thing.
We were newly-minted Disneyland locals, and we took full advantage of being within driving distance of Disney for the first time. We also didn’t really care about rides being down or construction walls. We wanted the locals’ experience of hanging around, and we sure got it. Our #1 attraction during that period was the “Running of the Goats” and we probably spent more time sitting around Rancho del Zocalo and Flo’s V8 Cafe than we did riding anything.
Not to get too far off-topic, but it was just a different era. We attended something called “Wednesdays with Walt” every week, and got to partake in free AP parties celebrating Indiana Jones Adventure, Dixieland at Disneyland, Disney Parks Blogs Meetups, and more. Think of these things like the Disneyland After Dark parties now, except free and better.
There’s the temptation to predict that the lead-up to Disneyland’s 70th Anniversary will be comparable to the lead-up to Disneyland’s 60th Anniversary. The circumstances are not quite the same, but they are similar.
However, it is a totally different era. The reason I went on that tangent above is to underscore just how much has changed with Disneyland. Those events that were free then would cost $150 today. Go ahead and look up Annual Pass prices–or don’t, unless you want to be depressed. Ditto SoCal ticket deals. FastPass was free. There was no Galaxy’s Edge, and the goats were running freely.
Obviously, Disneyland is and always has been a business. But if there’s one difference between then and now, it’s that the profit motive is now front and center, the first and arguably only priority. Everything has been optimized to squeeze guests for as much money is possible.
Another way this era is different is that we’re increasingly see guests be more responsive to pricing and planning their visits around discounts or dates when tickets are cheaper. This didn’t exist in the lead-up to the 60th Anniversary. Quite literally, as Disneyland didn’t introduce seasonal (value, regular, peak) ticket pricing until the following year.
More to the point, we haven’t really seen date-based ticket pricing (now with far more tiers) having a significant redistributive effect on crowds at Disneyland until the last couple of years. That’s probably because the cost difference is no longer fairly insignificant–the range is currently $104 to $206. That’s right, the most expensive day is almost double the cost of the cheapest!
During these last two years or so, the impact of less expensive dates on crowd levels has been much more pronounced. Whether that be via actual ticket discounts, dates with tiers at cheaper prices, or even lower tiers of Annual Passes being unblocked.
We’ve really noticed that this year, especially since the start of Halloween season. In the final five months of the year, the best predictor of year-over-year crowd levels has been prices. For example, it had been the case that October was incredibly busy despite higher prices over the course of the last several years.
With Halloween starting in August for the first time ever this year, we saw demand pulled forward to dates with cheaper prices and ticket deals. October still had plenty of moderate to high crowd dates, to be sure, but portions of August and September were comparatively busier, exceeding expectations.
To be sure, peak season dates around Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Ski Week, and Easter are still both busy and expensive. There’s so much demand for those brief school breaks that even sky high prices isn’t enough to dissuade enough people from visiting. Those are the exception, rather than the rule, though.
These trends are really more about the relatively random days that are significantly more or less expensive than adjacent dates. There are days in early November, for example, that have value season prices right before days with peak season prices. This can amount to an overnight swing of $65 per ticket! And this isn’t just happening around holiday vs. non-holiday weeks.
It’s a similar story with late October, when even random weekdays are among the most expensive dates to do Disneyland. November arrives, and prices plummet. That probably explains why October 27-31 was among one of the least crowded stretches of this entire year at Disneyland, with 1/10 crowd levels every day. Guests with flexibility waited a few days for November 1 to roll around, which brought with it significantly cheaper tickets…and heavier crowds.
Cobbling all of these lessons together as best as possible, here are some things I’d expect to see of 2025 Disneyland crowds…
First, winter will be busier than Disneyland fans expect. This is low-hanging fruit, admittedly, because there’s still this ingrained belief that winter is the ‘sleepy season’ at Disneyland. It’s a time when refurbishments are done. Weather gets cold and rainy, causing tourists to not make trips to Southern California and locals to stay home. There just isn’t much happening at Disneyland. Crowds should be lower.
That’s the perception, at least. Some of that is certainly true, but the part about it being a slow and sleepy off-season time at Disneyland is antiquated. It’s also Lunar New Year, Disneyland Half Marathon, a few winter breaks, when Magic Key APs are unblocked after a few weeks away, and the season of discounts. Winter hasn’t been off-season for a few years, which is a trend that should continue in January through March 2025.
These months are also when there are overlapping ticket discounts (see above) for both the general public and Southern California residents. That’ll bring a lot of deal-hunters to the park, just as it did last year.
After that comes Spring Break. This is one of those peak season windows that’s immune to overarching trends. It’ll probably be less busy than 2024, but it doesn’t really matter. Most guests who visit during weeks that Orange County, Los Angeles County, and other West Coast school districts are on break will perceive crowds as being fairly heavy. The better question is what happens after Spring Break.
Here’s where things get interesting, and my gut says it’s when Disneyland starts seeing a noticeable pullback in year-over-year crowd levels. My thinking here is that the cost sensitive guests are more likely to visit earlier in the ticket promotion periods, and the closer the Disneyland 70th Anniversary Celebration gets, the more likely people are to postpone visits until that begins.
The 70th will still be months away at the start of the year, and less front-of-mind for visitors. (There will also be dueling deals and lower base prices for other travel components beyond tickets, making January through March more attractive for value-seeking tourists.)
Once the 70th draws nearer, it’ll enter the equation for guests, more of whom will be willing to wait and pay more for a better experience. This isn’t to say all guests or even a majority will do this–just a larger number than at the beginning of the year, and enough to move the needle on crowd dynamics.
Not only that, but many budget-conscious locals and longtime fans will be willing to bet (probably correctly!) that there will be another ticket deal during the summer. So why take advantage of the winter and spring deal when there’s a bunch of great entertainment and another special offer right around the corner?
My expectation is that this will create a quirky dynamic where crowds drop precipitously following Easter. I would also expect lower crowds in March before Easter, since Spring Break season is later this year, and not all of those weeks from mid-March through late April will be truly busy. Weekly crowd levels will likely be up and down before Easter, depending upon how many major West Coast districts are on break.
Crowds will fall off a cliff around April 21, 2025 and stay low until at least the end of the month. Maybe even for the first full week of May 2025. After that, there will be the normal last hurrah as SoCal ticket holders scramble to “use it or lose it” before remaining unused dates on the discounted tickets expire. That last week of the deal will be busy (even though it’s during shoulder season and before the 70th starts), which is another safe prediction because it always happens.
The start of the Disneyland 70th Anniversary Celebration is where things get tricky.
My guess is that first two weeks won’t reflect higher crowd levels, which are based entirely on attraction wait times. That’s because a disproportionate number of guests will be Annual Passholders and other locals who are there primarily for new entertainment, food & beverages and merchandise–not rides. There will be a huge disconnect between attendance or “feels like” crowds and wait times.
After that, I’d expect summer to heat up gradually, with the bulk of the tourist crowds to arrive starting in mid-June and continuing until late July. One trend over the last couple of years has been for summer crowds to be backloaded, with there usually being a rush before schools go back into session. This is at least partially driven by deals, which often aren’t announced until summer starts (or is underway), leading to a lag before tourists can travel to take advantage of them. Regardless, a repeat of this is probably a safe bet.
Ultimately, my expectation is that Summer 2025 sees higher year-over-year attendance and wait times. I’d further forecast that most dates before that are down year-over-year, including Winter 2025 but especially March through mid-May 2025. Even though there’s an increasing number of Disneyland guests who are cost-sensitive, the celebration and entertainment will be viewed as enough of a value-add to win out over lower prices.
All of these are my best bets as to what’ll happen in 2025 with Disneyland attendance, wait times, congestion, etc. It should be stressed, as is probably obvious from the foregoing, that these are guesses I’m making based on a variety of recent (Fall 2024) and not-so-recent trends (Disneyland’s 60th Anniversary). All of this could be completely and utterly wrong, hence the caveat at the beginning that we’d caution against over-reliance in crowd calendars.
Planning a Southern California vacation? For park admission deals, read Tips for Saving Money on Disneyland Tickets. Learn about on-site and off-site hotels in our Anaheim Hotel Reviews & Rankings. For where to eat, check out our Disneyland Restaurant Reviews. For unique ideas of things that’ll improve your trip, check out What to Pack for Disney. For comprehensive advice, consult our Disneyland Vacation Planning Guide. Finally, for guides beyond Disney, check out our Southern California Itineraries for day trips to Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, and tons of other places!
Your Thoughts
Do you have any predictions for 2025 Disneyland crowds? Expect year-over-year increases or decreases? Think discounts or the 70th Anniversary will have the bigger impact on attendance? Do you agree or disagree with our advice about Disneyland crowd calendars, California weather, special events, school schedules, or anything else here? 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!
