Crazy Crowds Subside & Shoulder Season Starts with 2026’s Slowest Week at Disney World!

The bad news is that Walt Disney World just had its busiest month-long stretch in over a year, with Spring Break seeing higher crowds year over year and the elevated wait times continuing even after Easter. The good news is that’s past tense, and last week was not just the slowest of 2026, but the least busy since before Thanksgiving! This covers the wait times data, plus our on-the-ground experiences with 9/10 and 10/10 days at WDW.

Move over Punxsutawney Phil, because the Crowds Capybara (aka “Bay Lake Beatrice”) once again saw her shadow, predicting six or so weeks of low wait times at Walt Disney World. This is a positive prediction by Walt Disney World’s third or fourth best rodent, as we’re entering what’s known in the biz as “Shoulder Season.”

Many readers have asked what Shoulder Season means, which is a good question. Historically, it’s been known as the period between two peak seasons, typically Spring Break and Summer or Fall Break and Christmas. Legend has it that it’s called Shoulder Season because the shoulders are below the “peak” of the body, or the head.

By that logic, mid-August to mid-September would be “Butt Season” instead of the off-season. (I like that. It has a certain understated stupidity and blandly juvenile humor that we appreciate around these parts.) In actuality, Shoulder Season is a bit of a nonsensical term when it comes to Walt Disney World, for more reasons than its name.

Although Spring Break is peak season, summer isn’t. And unlike other travel destinations, there isn’t really a defined Shoulder Season in the second half of the year at Walt Disney World. But this window still does exist post-Easter, and I like the name, so it’s what we’ll continue to call this period between Spring Break and Memorial Day. Just like we refer to park opening as “rope drop,” even in places where there’s no rope involved. Now you know.

Speaking of Spring Break, it was busy. Our prediction was heavy crowds March 13, 2026, March 16-20, 2026 and March 30 to April 8, 2026. Our expectation was that the ‘least-bad’ week of spring break season would be in between, and that peak crowds would end on Wednesday, April 8, 2026.

We predicted that the following couple of weekdays would still be busy, but the weekend should not. Spring Break season would largely be over by April 10th, with the following week marking the unofficial arrival of shoulder season.

As it turned out, those predictions were mostly accurate. March 13 and 16-20 were the busiest dates of the first peak of Spring Break, followed by a less bad window from March 21-28. Crowds picked up again starting March 29, so we missed that prediction by a day. The peak week of Easter was over by April 4th, with the Sunday being considerably slower in the parks.

The following week was far busier than I expected, with high crowds from April 6-11, 2026. In fact, those weekdays after Easter was as busy as the ones before it, which is not what we expected.

The week following Easter is always a tricky one to predict; many private schools and other districts have it off, but the number is really contingent upon the timing of Easter. Last year, the holiday was a few weeks later and the dropoff the following Monday was immediate and pronounced.

Because Easter was earlier this year, we anticipated higher crowds in the week that followed, but not to the extent that they happened. Since we’re taking “credit” for accurate predictions in March, it’s only fair to call the forecast for the week after Easter a miss. We got the general ‘crowd contours’ right, but not their intensity.

As expected, Shoulder Season arrived in full force as of last week, with a sharp drop-off from Saturday, April 11th to Sunday, April 12th, and a continued downtrend in almost every day since.

To put that into perspective, Wednesday, April 8th saw 9/10 crowds across all of Walt Disney World and 45 minute average wait times. One week later on Wednesday, April 15th, the crowd level was 1/10 with a 24 minute average.

Crowds increased slightly heading into this last weekend, rising to hit a high of a 33 minute average wait time on Saturday, April 18th. That’s still significantly lower than the height of Spring Break season, and firmly in moderate crowds territory, but it does underscore the weekend spikes that can occur right now, due mostly to the tail end of the Florida resident ticket deal (with a small assist from ESPN Wide World of Sports events).

To put all of this into perspective, let’s dig into the data and look at Walt Disney World wait times. As always, all graphs and stats are courtesy of thrill-data.com:

We’ll start with the monthly numbers for Walt Disney World as a whole.

Since the lows of last September, Walt Disney World has gotten progressively busier. Although not every month has had worse crowds than the one before it, that’s the general trajectory. And as you’ll notice, that’s the same pattern year after year: crowds bottoming out in the fall, and climbing the months thereafter through March or April.

In order for that climb to happen, there also has to be a drop. That starts now, and is likely to continue every month between now and September 2026. Although April is currently tied with March in terms of wait times, that won’t last. Then May 2026 will be slower than this month, June will be slower than May, and so on and so forth. That is the clear trend for the last couple of years.

Although comparisons are difficult due to the shifting of holidays, 2026 crowds are pretty much on par with last year through April 20, 2026. January was slower, February was busier, March was identical, and through today, April is busier. None of this strikes me as particularly noteworthy.

Above is a look at the weekly crowd levels. The 6 bars on the far right are what we’ll be looking at. The last bar is the last week and shows the Shoulder Season slump starting.

Even including the slight spike over the weekend, that was actually the slowest week of 2026 (underscoring the slight nature of the spike). Although several other weeks have been within 1 minute of last week’s wait times, you’d have to go back to the week before Thanksgiving for lower crowds.

More than anything, this reinforces how busy Walt Disney World is to start the year, with January through March having fewer pockets of low crowds than in the past. In another two months, last week won’t still hold the crown as least busy week of 2026. It might not even be top 5. (It’ll depend on how much the ‘last hurrah’ of those Florida resident ticket deals drives crowds.)

We already discussed Spring Break crowds above, but the two bars before that should nevertheless reiterate just how busy the week after Easter was this year. The three bars before that encompass the totality of Spring Break season. Prior to that, there was another lull. The next spike was Mid-Winter Break/Mardi Gras/Presidents’ Day/Ski Week, which ended up on par with Spring Break.

Zooming in more, we come to the resort-wide daily numbers for Walt Disney World.

The week leading up to Easter was unsurprisingly busy, with a bit of a lull (comparatively) for the holiday weekend itself. No huge surprise there, as crowds heading home before the weekend has increasingly become the trend. This is driven by a number of factors, but mostly higher prices.

There ended up being a lot of 9/10 days during Spring Break, but no 10/10 dates for Walt Disney World as a whole. There were, however, plenty of 10/10 days at specific parks during that time (I experienced several of them!). Also notable is that although the peak season crowds lasted longer, there was a higher high over Mid-Winter Break (three day stretch of 46-49 minute waits) versus Spring Break (many days maxing out at 45 minutes across all of WDW).

Turning to on-the-ground observations, I spent a lot of time in the parks the week of and after Easter.

My experience was worse the week after Easter, which says more about the daily numbers in the parks I chose than it does crowd levels of Walt Disney World as a whole (which were almost identical for the two periods). The weekend itself was pleasant, save for Disney Springs, which was a madhouse.

My most negative experiences were all during Early Entry. After a streak of success fueled by lower crowds and more favorable hours, I did Early Entry on two days at both DHS and Magic Kingdom that should’ve had extensions but didn’t. None of those four days went well. I had better experiences at EPCOT and Animal Kingdom, thankfully.

My most positive experiences were largely thanks to rain. Multiple afternoons and evenings had persistent storms, and the combination of the timing and the duration of the rain actually did help to clear out crowds.

It also cancelled several Starlight performances; due to high wind, Luminous was shown without any pyro (a new-to-me presentation–normally they just nix the perimeter bursts). That same high wind did not ground the Skyliner, and my most thrilling ride in all of Walt Disney World was on that during a ‘Wind Advisory’ day.

The result was a few of the lowest crowd evenings I’ve had in Magic Kingdom and EPCOT in a while, during what should’ve been a peak week. I managed to loop several rides as walk-ons during this, including over a dozen on Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin one night (for research!) that helped me fine-tune my strategy. I also spent a lot of time with my camera sitting in puddles, looking like a doofus.

The daytime hours were worse, a dynamic that was probably exacerbated by the slower evenings. As noted above, Early Entry was busy at DHS and Magic Kingdom, and neither park moving forward the regular opening time compressed the crowds.

Even so, wait times only worsened from there until mid-to-late afternoon. My 10/10 days were at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and EPCOT; I was surprised that Magic Kingdom only peaked at 7/10 crowds, as they felt heavier.

Anecdotally, I also noticed significantly higher Lightning Lane utilization than at any point in the last two years. More guests buying Lightning Lane Multi-Pass during peak periods is hardly stop the presses news, but there were backups in these lines like I haven’t seen in a while; the merge point ratio was also more lopsided than it’s been.

This also doesn’t necessarily mean more people purchasing Lightning Lanes than last year. There also could be more availability (refills and same-day), increased DAS approvals, etc. This could be nothing, but I’ll be paying close attention during upcoming visits in May and June, and will report back if a higher LL to standby ratio seems like the ‘new normal.’

All of this should illustrate what we more or less already know, which is that wait times often don’t tell the full story of crowds at Walt Disney World. And conversely, anecdotal experiences of crowds and congestion are variable, which is why they’re unreliable.

Choosing different mornings to do MK and DHS would’ve yielded much better results, whereas different evenings at Magic Kingdom and EPCOT would’ve been considerably worse.

Others who visited during the weeks before and after Easter might ‘sound off’ in the comments with horror or success stories of their own. That doesn’t make either of us wrong–we just had different experiences. Walt Disney World is a big place; it happens.

Looking forward, Walt Disney World is now out of the woods with the worst of the crowds. Unless something goes terribly wrong, there won’t be another week as bad as those bookending Easter until mid-October 2026. We’ll have another update to our 2026 Walt Disney World Crowd Calendars very soon, but the bottom line is that there are very few ‘red flag’ dates in the coming months.

At this point, it’s basically just what’s currently on the ESPN Wide World of Sports calendar. The next few weekends, there are Cheerleading Championships, Cheerleading Worlds and Dance Worlds, and the Summit events for the same. These could cause a slight bounce-back in terms of crowds over the next few weeks.

These are major dance and cheerleading competitions that boost attendance at the parks and occupancy at the hotels, usually the All Stars and Coronado Springs. However, the impact on crowd levels in the parks isn’t significant as a whole–and tends to be overblown based on anecdotal experiences, which can be quite bad. (Meaning that you could think they’re a huge negative if you’re stuck in line for Haunted Mansion behind a group of 100 cheerleaders…or you might never see a single participant during a weeklong trip.)

The bigger and more underrated factor is the Florida resident ticket deal, which ends on May 16, 2026.

Wait times data from the last 3 years reveals that ticket discounts have caused crowds to spike in their final 2-3 weeks. And we know this is the primary driver of the increase, as opposed to ESPN WWoS events, because these ticket deals are offered during times of when there’s no youth sporting events happening, and the spike still happens with similar intensity.

These are “use it or lose it” tickets, so there’s always a last-minute rush like that. It’s especially bad on Saturdays and, to a lesser extent, Fridays through Sundays. Weekdays aren’t impacted nearly as much. This means that the next few weekends will see spikes, and progressively larger ones.

Aside from this, Walt Disney World’s attendance patterns are largely dictated by school breaks. As a result of this, far fewer guests in Disney’s core demo visit shortly after or before a major break. One major break just occurred, and another doesn’t start for another month-plus. (Once the current ticket deal ends and summer starts, weekends are likely to be slower than weekdays…until the next ticket deal winds down, and turns that dynamic on its head again.)

As a whole, it’s impossible to say whether the 2026 Shoulder Season will be slower than last year. I’m inclined to predict that it will, since that’s already the trajectory. Adjusting for Easter, the first week of this year’s Shoulder Season was already slower than the slowest week last year, and the trend is typically for a progressive slowdown until the first summer spike.

Given that, it seems safe to predict a slower Shoulder Season than last year. There’s also the reality that nothing that counts as a major draw to Walt Disney World is debuting between now and Memorial Day. To the contrary, Walt Disney World has better communicated opening dates this year, and there’s more of a jam-packed lineup for Cool Kids’ Summer that might result in higher crowds starting around May 26, 2026. (If you recall, Starlight was delayed last year and we had no date for that or Test Track until much later.)

Accordingly, we’d probably expect to see more 1/10 to 3/10 days than last year, and fewer 4/10 and 5/10 days. It probably won’t be a dramatic difference, but it might be enough that we can call now through late May 2026 the Butt Season as opposed to Shoulder Season.

We shall see, though. Perhaps Bay Lake Beatrice is wrong and crowds will increase as the Florida resident ticket deal winds down and stay elevated for the entirety of Cool Kids’ Summer; last week might’ve been an anomaly before a sustained spike over the next 5-6 weeks. Or conversely, maybe it’s not just six slower weeks, but more like 5-6 slower months. 

Even though Crowd Capybaras are about as reliable as crowd calendars these days, it’s highly likely that Shoulder Season will see a slowdown over the next 5 weeks. The same will likely be true of the next 5 months, or until the next uptick gets started for Fall Break. It’ll be an interesting saga to watch unfold, and our best guess based on the increased sense of urgency with discounts is that this is going to be a prolonged period of low to moderate attendance.

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

Were you at Walt Disney World for Spring Break? What were your impressions of crowds? Visiting during Shoulder Season, or waiting for everything that’s opening during Cool Kids’ Summer? Have you visited in the past during the month of May? Pleasantly surprised or did you find it to be incredibly busy? Do you agree or disagree with our 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!