Disney Data Dump July 16 2025

We’ve officially entered the final stretch before what I’m calling the “Starlight Summer Surge”. Crowds are still low. Shockingly low for mid-July. But you can feel the tension building. Families are holding off on their Magic Kingdom days, locals are waiting for the new parade, and the rest of us are enjoying just about the calmest July in recent memory. But downtime, thunderstorms, and early-arriving superfans are starting to shift things. Let’s see how the numbers looked in the last quiet week before everything changes. (Probably).

Observed Crowd Levels July 8 – 14

Still looking pretty great for mid-July! In fact, this is the least-crowded month for … several years. This July also has the least-crowded week and least-crowded day of the past several years if we exclude hurricane closures. That shouldn’t last for much longer with Test Track and Starlight Parade drawing in a bigger portion of summer visitors. You might think that the 14th shows the arrival of some of those crowds – but that’s more due to unexpected downtime than anything else. More on that later.

Looking at the data by park makes it EVEN more clear how much the impending debut of Starlight is impacting crowds. Quite a few families and Disney fans are delaying their summer trips until the parade has its premiere in less than a week. But even locals and people already in Orlando are delaying their Magic Kingdom days. All of the other parks “bounced back” from the extreme low crowds of July 2-6. But Magic Kingdom stayed at rock bottom.

Performance of Crowd Level Predictions

Each week, I give you a very transparent look into how the TouringPlans crowd level predictions performed. Each day at each park is one data point, so each week we have 28 different crowd level predictions to evaluate. Any time a prediction is within one or two crowd levels, things won’t really “feel” much different than what was predicted. Being off by 3 or more crowd levels is where you might feel that difference in wait times throughout the day.

In the past week, Touring Plans predictions were either spot-on or within 1 crowd level 21% of the time. For the first time in a long time, we actually had two park-days with spot-on predictions: Animal Kingdom and EPCOT on July 14th. But that was more luck than anything else, with a significant amount of downtime impacting wait times on that day. 39% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get an F for our predictions in the past week. But at least it was like … a higher F? All misses were over-predictions, meaning that crowds came in lower than expected throughout the past week. On average, the crowd level at any park any day of the week was about 2.7 crowd levels below prediction. That means crowds were once again significantly, noticeably, below what was predicted. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 5 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on THREE different days – July 8th, 12th and 13th. So probably just good to note that HS isn’t going to be hitting the crowd level 8s and 9s predicted on the calendar. Not gonna happen. Don’t plan for it. (That’s the same note as last week … just re-emphasizing).

Attraction Downtime July 8 – 14

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 5% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a bit up from the past couple of weeks, and a lot of it is due to afternoon thunderstorms becoming more consistent. In the past week, Animal Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 8% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. It had a couple of PARTICULARLY bad days.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on July 14th. On that day, 11% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. That’s one of the highest numbers we’ve ever seen. The worst park-day of the week was on July 14th at Animal Kingdom. On that day, 26% of attraction capacity was lost due to unexpected downtime. Animal Kingdom was open for 10.5 hours on the 14th, so 26% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park shutting down for over 160 minutes. So it’s like the park was open for less than 8 hours instead of 10.5 hours. Ouch ouch ouch. That was mostly thanks to Kali River Rapids being down almost all day, plus Everest and Dinosaur both having major issues too.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

In the past week, Astro Orbiter was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. It was unexpectedly down for 29% of the past week. The worst day at Astro Orbiter, when the attraction was down for 99% of the day. It went down mid-day on the 13th and didn’t come back up all day on the 14th. Not great for an attraction that is just back from refurbishment!

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are problematic offenders from the past week, with the percentage of downtime during the first hour of the day in parentheses:

• Magic Kingdom: Pirates of the Caribbean (28%), Astro Orbiter (25%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (14%), Mickey’s PhilharMagic (10%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo & Friends (14%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (16%), Millennium Falcon (12%)
• Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (14%)

The good news here is that our typical rope drop headliners (7DMT, Space Mountain, Tron, Cosmic Rewind, Remy, Frozen, Rise, Slinky, Flight of Passage) aren’t on the lists this week. But quite a few good secondary options are. No gold stars this week.

Wait Times July 8 – 14

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at Each Park

• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 74 minutes (was 67 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 70 minutes (was 56 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 66 minutes (was 67 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 63 minutes (was 56 minutes two weeks ago)

This headliner data really confirms what we saw above in the park-by-park crowd level data. Things were up compared to the ridiculously low first week of July. Except at Magic Kingdom, where wait times have stayed nice and low. So far, Magic Kingdom is having two weeks of party days in July, as far as wait times are concerned. Everyone is just avoiding the park like it’s closing early. Except really they’re avoiding the park because they want to wait to visit when the parade is running.

Parks with the Highest and Lowest Average Wait

These parks likely won’t change week-to-week unless something ridiculous happens, but these data points will give us a high-level view of how wait times are trending from week to week.

• Highest: Animal Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 35 minutes (was 29.5 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 21 minutes (was 19 minutes last week)

These look like big overall wait time increases (and, to be fair, they are). But in the grand scheme of all wait times … these are still VERY low. We usually don’t see overall wait times this low unless it’s late August or early September. We’re just spoiled this summer.

Most Inflated Posted Wait Times

We all know that Disney inflates their posted wait times on purpose. They have many reasons for doing this. Some are totally understandable, and some are potentially more problematic. We can figure out how much posted wait times are being inflated by comparing submitted actual wait times from the Lines App and the posted wait time when the person timing their wait entered the line.

Over the past week, actual wait times in the Lines App averaged 68% of what was posted. That’s pretty average for the Genie+ era, and back to our new normal average for the LLMP era. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait less than 41 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Tomorrowland PeopleMover. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 44% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if PeopleMover had a 15 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 7 minutes instead. Less than half of what was posted. Remember to always check the Lines app for predicted actual waits instead of making decisions based on what is posted.

This Week’s Wait Time Rock Star

Between July 8th ad 14th, we had almost 1000 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was jjgilchrist, with 36 overall timed waits – 21 standby waits and 15 Lightning Lane waits. Thanks for all of that timing, jjgilchrist! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: July 15 – 21

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 15th will already be in the past by the time you’ve read this, so welcome to your future!

We’ve made it through the calm before the storm. And what a calm it has been. But things are about to change. Specifically, they’ll change on July 20th. And maybe a couple of days before as visitors who delayed their summer vacations until the parade would be running start to arrive. That means I think we’re at the end of our rock-bottom wait times and crowd levels. I don’t expect things to get wild and crazy any time soon (but they might this fall and winter …), but I do expect crowds and waits to get a little closer to predictions. And Magic Kingdom in the evenings is going to be a madhouse for the foreseeable future. Pack your patience, and go to the late parade at 11 pm if you can.

Side note: this also means that party days this fall are going to be especially uncrowded because even more than in the past few years, day visitors are going to want to see the parade AND fireworks in the evening, and they can’t on party days. If you have park hoppers, Magic Kingdom on party days should be GLORIOUS.

As far as weather outlook, You’ll either have afternoon storms to be prepared for, or you’ll be dealing with extreme heat all day long. Either way, have an indoor plan.

Bonus Content: Unofficial Guide Giveaway

If you made it this far, you deserve something special this week. I received my batch of advance copies of the 2026 Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World earlier this week, and they’re clearly taking up too much space in my house. So for this week only, any comment on this Disney Data Dump that contains a helpful review of or comment about a Disney resort, attraction, dining location, or experience will receive one entry into a drawing. I’ll select the winner on July 22nd and announce on next week’s post who that is. Then I’ll send you a copy of the 2026 Guide before it’s even officially published! You get one entry per separate comment. This is my not-so-sneaky way to source some helpful reader comments for the 2027 edition of the Guide 🙂

Were you in the parks this past week? Or are you headed to Orlando soon? Let me know in the comments below!