Disney World Week Ahead: October 25 – October 31, 2026

Walt Disney World Next Week: October 25-31, 2026

Here is the headline: Halloween week is one of the lightest stretches you will ever catch at Walt Disney World. Every park sits at a 1 or a 2 on most days, with only Hollywood Studios pushing higher. If you have flexibility, this is a week to walk on rides and take your time.

The week at a glance

The shape is flat and low. Resort-wide, Sunday is the “busy” day at a 3, Monday is the floor at a 1, and Tuesday through Saturday hold steady at a 2. The drivers are simple: four Halloween party nights pull the evening crowd out of the Magic Kingdom and spread it thin, Disney flagged Monday through Thursday as Good-To-Go days to coax locals in, and there is no school holiday stacking the gates. Animal Kingdom is the best park Tuesday through Friday, the Magic Kingdom wins Sunday, Monday and Saturday, and Hollywood Studios is the park to avoid every single day of the week.

Day by day

Sunday, October 25

Best park is the Magic Kingdom at a 1; avoid Hollywood Studios at a 4, which carries the week’s highest predicted wait at 37 minutes. It is a party night, so the Magic Kingdom closes to day guests at 6 PM, and EPCOT opens an hour late at 10. Heavy rain is in the forecast, so pack the poncho. The play: Magic Kingdom at opening, then hop at 4 PM to Hollywood Studios, which runs about 36 minutes at four and eases from 6 PM. Magic Kingdom’s one-day ticket is $189.

Monday, October 26

The lightest day of the week, a resort-wide 1. Best park is the Magic Kingdom at a 1, avoid Hollywood Studios at a 2, and EPCOT and Animal Kingdom are both at a 1 too. It is a Good-To-Go day, Disney’s own signal that it expects thin attendance. Animal Kingdom’s ticket is the cheapest on the board at $164. Rope drop whatever you most want and you will barely break stride; a light drizzle is possible but nothing a hat won’t handle.

Tuesday, October 27

Best park is Animal Kingdom at a 1; avoid Hollywood Studios at a 3. Another party night drops the Magic Kingdom’s 6 PM curtain for day guests, and it is a Good-To-Go day. Run Animal Kingdom at opening, then hop at 4 PM to Hollywood Studios, which runs about 36 minutes and eases from 6 PM. Drizzle midday, the lowest rain odds of the week.

Wednesday, October 28

Best park is Animal Kingdom at a 1, where the predicted 15-minute wait ties for the shortest of the week; avoid Hollywood Studios at a 2. Good-To-Go again. EPCOT and Animal Kingdom share the cheapest tickets at $174 and $164. Animal Kingdom at opening, then hop at 4 PM to Hollywood Studios, running about 35 minutes and easing from 5 PM.

Thursday, October 29

Best park is Animal Kingdom at a 1; avoid Hollywood Studios at a 3. The Magic Kingdom closes to day guests at 6 PM for the party, and this is the day the Walt Disney World Railroad is slated to return in shuttle mode. Good-To-Go once more. Magic Kingdom’s ticket ticks up to $194. Animal Kingdom at opening, hop at 4 PM to Hollywood Studios, easing from 6 PM.

Friday, October 30

Best park is Animal Kingdom at a 1; avoid Hollywood Studios at a 4. This is where Disney’s pricing gets interesting: both Hollywood Studios and the Magic Kingdom hit $199, their highest of the week. For Hollywood Studios, that agrees with the calendar’s 4. For the Magic Kingdom, sitting at a 2, Disney is pricing for a weekend the calendar does not see. Animal Kingdom at opening, hop at 4 PM to Hollywood Studios, which eases from 5 PM.

Saturday, October 31

Halloween. Best park is the Magic Kingdom at a 2; avoid Hollywood Studios at a 4. It is a party night, so the Magic Kingdom closes to day guests at 6 PM. Tickets run $199 at both the Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios. The plan: Magic Kingdom at opening, then hop at 4 PM to Animal Kingdom, which runs about 19 minutes and is already easing by then.

Four days? Here’s your week

The best four-day window is Sunday through Wednesday, total crowd level of just 5: you catch the Magic Kingdom at its Sunday 1, slip into Hollywood Studios on its quiet Monday 2, let EPCOT carry Tuesday at a 1, and close at Animal Kingdom’s Wednesday 1.

• Mon-Thu: Monday Magic Kingdom, Tuesday Animal Kingdom, Wednesday Hollywood Studios, Thursday EPCOT
• Tue-Fri: Tuesday Animal Kingdom, Wednesday Hollywood Studios, Thursday EPCOT, Friday Magic Kingdom
• Wed-Sat: Wednesday Hollywood Studios, Thursday Animal Kingdom, Friday EPCOT, Saturday Magic Kingdom

If your dates land later in the week, the Mon-Thu, Tue-Fri and Wed-Sat windows below are nearly as soft.

How each park flows

Magic Kingdom. On a normal day it fills by 11 AM and peaks around 6 PM at 28 minutes, trailing to 16 minutes in the last open hour at 9. But four of next week’s days are party nights (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday), when the park closes to day guests at 6 PM and the day ends then. On those dates it fills by 10 AM and tops out near 5 PM at 20 minutes. Tron Lightcycle / Run opens around 45 minutes and climbs to a 90-minute peak at 7 PM, so ride it in the first hour.

EPCOT. Fills by 10 AM and peaks at 11 AM near 32 minutes, then drifts down to about 24 minutes in the final hour at 8 PM, with Food & Wine giving the evening plenty to do off the ride track. Test Track runs about 55 minutes in the first hour and peaks at 11 AM near 75; it is the one to knock out early.

Hollywood Studios. Fills by 10 AM and peaks hard at 11 AM around 43 minutes, settling to 26 minutes by the last hour at 8 PM. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance opens near 30 minutes and peaks at 10 AM around 55, so first thing beats late every time here.

Animal Kingdom. The star of your week. It fills by 10 AM and peaks at 11 AM near 34 minutes, then eases through the afternoon to 19 minutes in its last open hour at 5 PM. Expedition Everest is a near walk-on at rope drop, just 5 minutes, before climbing to a 35-minute peak at 11 AM.

On the news front, the National Hurricane Center reports no tropical formation expected across the Atlantic basin through about November 1, so the only weather to plan around next week is routine rain and drizzle, per NOAA.

Last week in brief

Last week finished soft and ended with a bang. The lightest day resort-wide was Thursday at a 1; the busiest was Saturday at a 6, capped by the Magic Kingdom’s heaviest single park-day of the week at an 8. Over at Animal Kingdom, a few attractions ran remarkably short against their norms: Kali River Rapids averaged 11 minutes against a typical 23, and the Wildlife Express Train sat at 6 against a typical 11.

Reliability was the real sore spot. Slinky Dog Dash at Hollywood Studios had the longest single outage of the week, about 3.5 hours starting Thursday at 8:31 AM, so anyone who rope-dropped Toy Story Land that morning had to pivot. Big Thunder Mountain at the Magic Kingdom was in and out of service all seven days, including a roughly 2.5-hour stretch Thursday evening, and Frozen Ever After at EPCOT went down repeatedly across five of the days. If you planned a morning around any one of those three, you needed a backup.

How our calls did

A middling week, so here it is straight. The call that matters most, which park is best, was right 71% of the time, and the avoid-park call landed 43%. The clear win was Animal Kingdom: we called it the best park four days running, Tuesday through Friday, and it delivered each time on a stretch with no party pulling crowds its way.

On raw accuracy, we were within one level on 8 of 28 park-days, with an average wait error of 4.2 minutes. Across the last four weeks, our best-park call sits at 61%, avoid at 57% and within-one at 38%, so read this week as one data point in that run. The clearest miss: Tuesday Hollywood Studios, which we called a 6 and which came in at a 1, with the wait called at 39 minutes against an actual 23. The data doesn’t show a reason that day. And last week specifically, 18 of our 20 misses ran too high, calling days busier than they turned out; over four weeks the misses don’t lean either way, so that is last week’s quirk, not a habit.

Open Lightning Brain once you’re in the park

This is a walk-on kind of week, the sort where you can relax and let the day unfold. Lightning Brain is the independent, real-time companion for exactly that: open it in the park for live wait times and ride status across all four parks, outages tracked the moment they happen, and walk-vs-wait sorting right on your lock screen. The free dashboard stays free forever. The outlook helps you pick the day; Lightning Brain is what you check once you are standing in it. Grab it at lightningbrain.app or on the App Store.