Disney Data Dump October 7 2026

Observed Crowd Levels September 29 – October 5

Wellll that’s not a fast start to fall! Two crowd level one days to wrap up September and kick off October isn’t bad. But the weeks leading into 10/12 and following 10/12 have many more fall breaks, so we’ll see what happens over the coming couple of weeks.

At the park level, things look even more calm, overall. Animal Kingdom had its normal “wave” behavior, peaking on Saturday/Sunday and then lowering around Wednesday – but overall it was much less crowded than it’s been for the past few weeks. Hollywood Studios never got above a crowd level 2 all week! EPCOT saw its highest waits on Saturday, after the debut of the rest of the Food & Wine festival booths. And Magic Kingdom demonstrated nearly perfect party season behavior, averaging crowd level 1 on every party day, and crowd level 4 on non-party days. Expect those party/non-party differences to get even bigger as we head throughout October.

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 68% of the time, which is still pretty good compared to a lot of our summer results. And 100% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that’s a very rare A+ on predictions for the last week! There were more 3.5x more overpredictions than underpredictions, which means overall the parks were less crowded than expected. Which is crazy, after a summer of continually editing predictions downward. But here we are. No big misses of the week to call out, since everything was within 2 crowd levels!

Attraction Downtime September 29 – October 5

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4.9% of attractions unexpectedly being down. This is exactly the same as the past two weeks, and significantly lower than most of the summer. And over the past week, EPCOT was the park with the worst overall downtime, averaging 5.3% of its capacity lost to downtime. Not a bad result for worst park.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on September 29th. On that day, 7% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. But the worst park-day of the past week was on October 4th, at EPCOT, when 9% of its capacity was lost due to unexpected downtime. Thankfully, once again, this is our lowest “winning” number in several months. EPCOT was open for 12 hours on the 4th, so 9% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park shutting down for almost 65 minutes. Certainly that has an impact, but it’s not as bad as the multi-hour whole-park downtimes we saw through most of the summer!

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

Some things never change …. mostly, Test Track and its reliable unreliability. Test Track is still on top of our downtime list, like it has been for most of the summer … and now the fall. Test Track was unexpectedly down for 17% of the past week. Which, to be fair, is one of its lowest “winning” percentages in many months. Its worst day of the past week was on October 4th, when it was down for 32% of the day. Again, not a terrible result. But that day was particularly frustrating because it wasn’t one big stretch of downtime – it kept going down randomly throughout the day.

The attraction with the next-highest downtime over the past week was Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, which had 14% downtime.

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 (26%), Big Thunder Mountain (18%), Under the Sea (18%), Space Mountain (11%), Buzz Lightyear (10%)
• EPCOT: Gran Fiesta Tour (21%), Frozen Ever After (15%), Cosmic Rewind (14%), Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (12%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (30%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (28%), Runaway Railway (21%), Slinky Dog Dash (14%)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (15%)

Overall, not a bad week for rope drop at Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom. But over at EPCOT, three major headliners had significant downtime issues. And at Hollywood Studios, the Rise/Rock/Slinky downtime combo was especially bad this week.

I’m particularly disappointed in Rock’n’Roller Coaster which used to ALWAYS show up on this list, but has been pretty reliable since its retheming. Hopefully this doesn’t mark a return to its disappointing rope drop performance of the past.

Wait Times September 29 – October 5

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at Each Park

• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 74 minutes (was 79 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 52 minutes (was 61 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 46 minutes (was 53 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 41 minutes (was 57 minutes last week)

Now these are surprising numbers! Not only did every headliner see its average posted wait go down week-over-week, but Cosmic Rewind was the only attraction in all of WDW with an average posted wait of over an hour! Even weirder, all of the top three average wait times were at EPCOT (Test Track at 59 minutes and Frozen Ever After at 54 minutes). It was an easy week for touring popular attractions!

Parks with the Highest and Lowest Average Wait September 29 – October 5

• Highest: Hollywood Studios, average park-wide posted wait of 28 minutes (was 34.5 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 17.5 minutes (was 19 minutes last week)

Boy oh boy those are some exciting drops in wait times from an overall park perspective! This means that every park had an average posted wait of under half an hour. And Hollywood Studios was 20% better this week than it was last week. Not the way I expected us to enter October, but potentially a good note to make for visits in 2027 if you want to hit spooky season but avoid as much summer weather as possible.

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 74% of what was posted. That’s pretty close to our historical average in the era of Lightning Lanes. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait less than 45 minutes instead.

But the worst inflation offender for the past week was The Seas with Nemo and Friends. (Just like the past two weeks!) At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 23% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if Nemo had a 20 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited 4.5 minutes instead. Less than a quarter of what was posted!

This Week’s Wait Time Rock Star September 29 – October 5

Between September 29th and October 5th we had just over 900 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. And the person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was nomad527, with 30 overall timed waits – 12 Lightning Lane waits and 18 standby waits. Thanks for all of that timing, nomad527! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: October 6 – 12

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 6th will already be in the past by the time you’ve read this, so we’re back to the future!

We’re ramping up into Halloween party season, but it’s also a long weekend when Disney is trying to keep the parks open as long as possible, so we only have three parties in the upcoming week – on October 6th, 8th, and 9th. There is also a party on the 13th. Clearly October 7th will be VERY CROWDED at Magic Kingdom. That day is surrounded by three party nights. If you can avoid that evening in the Magic Kingdom, you probably should.

This is also peak fall break season, with the long weekend October 10-12. Be prepared for higher crowds and longer waits than we’ve seen in many many months. Pack your patience!

Unfortunately, the 6th, 8th, and 10th also look more rainy than usual. So in addition to your patience, pack your rain gear too. Hopefully all of that rain clears up before we head into next week!

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