Getting an idea what your Disney World tickets will cost can mean plowing through several screens of pretend purchasing before bailing at the payment step.  It shouldn’t have to be that hard to know how much you’ll need to pay — in this article you can see Disney’s regular ticket price for every day in 2022. We’ll cover how add-ons and multi-day tickets can affect your bottom line (and also why you might want them), and if you’re looking to save a few dollars we have tips on that too.

Looking for 2023 prices?  Find them here.

Before we get started, I’m just going to say … the array of dates, prices, and add-ons can begin to feel dazzling.  As you read through, you may begin to see sparkles and wonder whether you need a professional Disney matchmaker to find the ticket that’s Right For You in 2022. If you do, feel free to put this down and reach out to our friends at TouringPlans Travel; they can talk you through it and buy the tickets for you too.

Single-Day Base Tickets

In 2018 Disney went to a date-based model, where the price of your ticket depends on when you visit.  At that time there were only three single-day price tiers — Peak, Regular, and Value — but in 2022 there are nineteen (19!) different prices for a single-day base ticket.

This is totally a data nerd take, but having this many prices presents a display challenge.  Numbers with no coloring is just a hot mess.  Adding dates would be nice, but it increases the size and interferes with color scaling.  Later in the post I’ll use a different visual to make it easier to track the dates, but I left them out just below so that we can look at something interesting.

Disney World does not publish a crowd calendar … but that kind of looks like one, doesn’t it?  When planning a vacation, we might not have flexibility to adjust our dates based on saving a few dollars a day. But the chart above could be a good model to get an idea what the parks might look like when we’re there.

Going in January and September?  You might begin to picture spending weekdays in the parks and using the weekend for resort days. Planning for November and wondering what the heck is going on that first week?  It’s Jersey Week, where many New Jersey schools have extra days off and it bumps the Crowd Levels up a notch or two.

Of course, we have a Crowd Calendar here at TouringPlans, and we update our predictions several times a year. That leads to an obvious question: if this is Disney’s prediction of what crowds will look like a year out, do they update the prices over time like we update our predicted crowd levels?  When we first published this article in November 2021, Disney hadn’t increased prices in over a year, and we thought the answer might be no; they were rolling in the increases as they released new batches of tickets. Then prices for many days increased on Feb. 15, 2022, so it looks like the answer is yes!  We’ve updated all the charts here to include those increases.

Add-Ons and Multi-Day Pricing

Disney offers three ticket upgrades that can be added on to any length of ticket. The Water Park and Sports add-on is good for admission to a variety of activities related to (surprise!) water parks and sports.  The Park Hopper add-on lets you visit more than one park in a single day.  The combo with both add-ons is the Park Hopper Plus. If you already know what all these are you can skip the individual sections and go straight to the summary chart and value analysis.

Park Hopper Add-On

If you buy a 4-day base ticket, you get four admissions to the Disney World theme parks between the start date of your ticket and the expiration date a week later. However, each admission only gives you entry to one park, and you can’t use more than one admission per day.  This means you can’t buy a 5-day ticket and use it to visit Magic Kingdom and EPCOT in the same day just by spending an “extra” admission that day.

The Park Hopper lets you go from park to park on a single admission. You need to tap into the park where your reservation is before you can hop, and you can’t hop before 2 p.m., but after that you can switch parks as many times as you like. Adding the Park Hopper is $65 for a 1-day ticket, $75 for 2-day and 3-day tickets, and $85 for 4-10 day tickets.

Water Parks & Sports Add-On

The Water Parks & Sports add-on is a flat $70 no matter how long your ticket is, and gives you the same number of entitlements as you have ticket days. Entitlements can be redeemed for any of the following:

• A water park visit to Typhoon Lagoon (currently closed) or Blizzard Beach
• A round of mini-golf (before 4 p.m.) at Fantasia Gardens or Winter Summerland
• A round of golf at Disney’s Oak Trail Golf Course
• A round of FootGolf at Disney’s Oak Trail Golf Course
• A visit to ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex (currently closed)

One thing that you definitely need to know when considering this add-on is that the expiration date of a 4-day ticket is not four days after the start date — it’s actually a week. The number of “extra” days that you have to use your tickets varies with the length, but you don’t have to go to the theme parks and use one of your WPS admissions in the same day every day in order to use them all. And, the Water Parks & Sports add-on actually gives you an extra day before your ticket expires, compared to the same length base ticket.

That said, there are a couple of funky rules.  In general you can use more than one admission per day; for instance you can go to a water park and play mini-golf in the same day.  But mini-golf is only free before 4 p.m. and there’s a max of one round per day (you can pay out of pocket for additional rounds).  On the flip side, park hopping is automatic at the water parks; you can visit Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach in the same day on just one admission.

Park Hopper Plus

The Park Hopper Plus gives you both the park hopping ability of the regular Park Hopper add-on, and the extra activities of the Water Parks & Sports add-on.  Plus, compared to the base ticket the Hopper Plus gives you an extra day before your ticket expires to do all that stuff in … because with all that hopping back and forth and up and down, you might need it to keep from getting really tired. Park Hopper Plus is $85 for a 1-day ticket, $95 for 2-day and 3-day tickets, and $105 for 4-10 day tickets.

Multi-Day Tickets (and Stats)

Since the introduction of Magic Your Way tickets in 2005, Disney World tickets have been cheaper per day the longer you stay, and that hasn’t changed with the variable-date pricing. But even the multi-day tickets have variable prices, so how does that work? The answer is that Disney takes the average price per day over all the days that your ticket is valid — and remember that that is not the same as the number of days on your ticket — and multiplies it by the number of days of admission.  That number is then multiplied by a fixed discount that varies with the number of days to reduce the overall price per day.

Looking at the chart above, it’s easy to see that after 4 days the amount for each additional day on the ticket falls off quite sharply.  The median 1-day ticket is $139, the median 4-day ticket about 3.5 times that at $484 — but it’s only an additional $135 to get all the way to 10 days. Put differently: the first day of a 10-day ticket often costs more than the last six days combined.

No matter how long your ticket is, the TouringPlans Ticket Calculator looks at the alignment between your ticket length and your trip length and helps you find the cheapest day on which to start your ticket.  The Ticket Calculator is also the place to go if you plan to buy tickets from an authorized reseller instead of direct from Disney, as it can help you find the one that has the best price for your specific ticket.

What’s Worth It?

Now that we’ve got this large collection of numbers that go into the price of your ticket, I feel like it’s time for a nice chart so we can see them all in one place.

Let’s start with what’s easy: if you’re going to a water park for even one day, you should strongly consider buying the Water Parks add-on for just a dollar more. At that point a single round of mini-golf will make it pay off, and if you somehow don’t get there you won’t have lost much. What’s harder to say is when a Park Hopper is worth it, because that’s totally going to be dependent on your personal style.

There’s a lot of synergy in the combo though, and that’s very much worth considering if you’re definitely getting at least one add-on..  If you’re buying a 7-day ticket and you might only hop a couple of times, the median 7-day ticket price breaks down to $80 per day and paying half that again ($42.50) to use it on two days might feel pretty steep.  If you’re already buying the Water Parks & Sports though, upgrading to the Hopper Plus is only $17.50 per day to spend those two days hopping; that might feel a lot more reasonable.  Going the other way, if you’re already buying the Park Hopper then a couple of rounds of mini-golf will make the Hopper Plus pay off without going anywhere near a water park.

One thing to remember about Disney tickets: you can always upgrade by adding on features or extra days, right up until the end of the last day that you use them in the parks, and it will only cost you the difference between the original price of the ticket you’re upgrading to, and the price of the ticket you initially bought.  It’s never too late to make your ticket more expensive, but it’s hard to make it cheaper once Disney has your money.

All. The. Prices.

I promised you all the prices for 2022, and here they are.  Colors on each chart are scaled for the length of ticket across all of 2022, that is: 3-day tickets are scaled against all 3-day tickets, not against 2-day tickets in the same month. To save you from scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, only the adult base ticket prices are shown. To get the prices for a Park Hopper, Water Parks & Sports, or Park Hopper Plus add-on, increase the price of each ticket by the amounts in the table below.  For child tickets, use 96.7% of the adult base ticket value and then adjust for any add-ons.  All prices exclude tax.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

 

Do you adjust your dates to get a better price on your ticket? What’s your favorite add-on? Let us know in the comments!