Magic Kingdom After Hours Strategy 2025
Disney’s After Hours offers so many attractions! So much food! So few people! Does it live up to the hype? It turns out that After Hours is an excellent choice if any of those things are important to you as you tour the Magic Kingdom. In this post, we’re going to cover some basic information about the After Hours experience in Magic Kingdom, as well as an example strategy (or two or three) if you plan on attending After Hours in the next few months.
Magic Kingdom After Hours Dates and Hours
Currently, the After Hours event is scheduled to happen at Magic Kingdom on the following dates in 2025:
- January 20, 27
- February 3, 10, 17 and 24
- March 3, 17, 24 and 31
- April 7 and 28
- May 5, 12 and 19
On each of these nights, the After Hours event begins at 10 p.m. and runs until 1 a.m. But what makes this event even more “worth it” is that you can enter Magic Kingdom as early as 7 p.m. with your event ticket – meaning you can still watch Happily Ever After even without a day ticket! (Note: You can check if additional dates have been added at Disney’s Magic Kingdom After Hours page.)
How to Get Your Wristband
In order to stay in the park after 10 p.m., you have to check in and get your wristband. If you arrive at the Magic Kingdom after event check-in has started (usually 7 p.m.), you can just check in at the Main Entrance.
If you’ve used regular ticket admission to enter the Magic Kingdom earlier in the day and you’re still in the park when 7 p.m. rolls around, you’ll need to pick your After Hours wristband. You can find in-park check-in at any of the following locations:
- Liberty Square ticket office
- Adventureland near Tortuga Tavern
- Tomorrowland across from Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor
All About the Snacks
After Hours events include all-you-can-enjoy snacks! At the Magic Kingdom, there are seven different snack carts so that you can fuel up no matter what part of the park you’re in. Your snack choices include:
- Ice cream novelties
- Popcorn
- Bottled beverages (water, soda, etc.)
If snacks aren’t quite enough sustenance for you, Casey’s Corner is open – with Mobile Order available – during the entire party. The Main Street Bakery stays open too.
Suggested After Hours Strategy
Here comes the fun part! Tickets for the event are limited to 3,000 people. Spoiler alert: that means very minimal waits during After Hours – you don’t really need to hit rides in any “particularly effective” order once After Hours starts. But the bonus is that by entering the park 3 hours before the event, you can get even more done.
Since you don’t need a strategy to avoid lines once 10 o’clock rolls around, the strategy here is all about what to do after you arrive and before the party officially starts. Here’s what we suggest!
- Check in, and then enjoy some of Tomorrowland – ride the PeopleMover and play a round of Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin
- Start making your way across the park by heading toward Main Street to watch Happily Ever After, which will still be crowded.
- As soon as Happily Ever After is over, work on completing rides on the “left side” of the park. You won’t be able to experience Tiana’s Bayou Adventure without a day ticket. But you can ride Pirates of the Caribbean, Jungle Cruise, and potentially even Haunted Mansion before the After Hours even even begins!
- If you need to fill a little time as guests filter out of the park, this is a great time to order a fuel-up from Casey’s Corner so that you can power through the rest of the night!
- Once the event starts, ride it’s a small world and Peter Pan’s Flight
- Grab spots for Enchantment at 11 pm in front of the castle
- Continue working across Fantasyland by riding Winnie the Pooh, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Under the Sea, and Mad Tea Party
- Make sure to pause every now and then for some snacks and to take in the peaceful atmosphere of a mostly empty Magic Kingdom
- Finish up the night back in Tomorrowland, riding Space Mountain and TRON and whatever you’d like to repeat.
This attraction list may not exactly match what your party wants to experience during After Hours, but it provides an example of everything you can accomplish with your ticket. Often, more than you could do in a full day on a high-crowd day, and it shouldn’t even feel rushed! Wait times are very, very low throughout the event. Non-headliners are generally walk-on, and even headliners max out at a 25-minute posted wait (including standby at TRON!). And that posted wait is very inflated.
One note is that during the first After Hours event of 2025, Tron was unavailable for a couple of hours. This did have an impact on wait times at other attractions, and made its posted wait time higher when it did come back online. So downtime may impact your After Hours experience and planning.
Optional Add-Ons
You could easily add in Magic Carpets, Prince Charming’s Regal Carrousel, Barnstormer, Dumbo, and Tomorrowland Speedway into the plan above. You would probably have to skip some snacks. But they don’t have great satisfaction scores, so I didn’t want to include them in the plan. If you like the idea of a magical carrousel ride at midnight, or a late-night spin on the Speedway, go for it!
Alternate Ideas!
Maybe you just want to do those “big” attractions during After Hours. If so – based on wait times during the first event, you could likely accomplish the following just between 10 pm and 1 am (excluding pre-event time):
- 3x Seven Dwarfs Mine Train
- 3x Space Mountain
- 2x TRON
Or you could enjoy a mix of classics and headliners:
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- Haunted Mansion
- 2x Seven Dwarfs Mine Train
- 2x Space Mountain
- TRON
- TTA PeopleMover
Do have tickets for an upcoming After Hours event at Magic Kingdom? How would you spend your three hours with almost no lines?
(First published January 15, 2023. Last updated January 15, 2025.)
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“You won’t be able to experience Tiana’s Bayou Adventure without a day ticket.” I realize the Virtual Queue for Tiana’s is very very unlikely to still be open for people who don’t enter the park until 7:00 or later. But I heard that during party season, people who had only party tickets were able to buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass and book LLMP reservations for the period between when they could enter (4:00) and the start of the party. That allowed them to ride Tiana’s before the party started. Can people who have only an After Hours ticket do the same?
According to Disney’s policies, you are not supposed to be able to purchase LLMP without valid theme park admission for that day. That excludes parties and after hours events. It’s possible that some people got around this policy, but since that wording exists, you definitely shouldn’t be able to count on doing it.
Disney’s answer to this question across multiple PlanDisney answers and when we have inquired is that you need regular admission to purchase LLMP and event tickets can’t be used for this. It may be that there is a bug that allows guest experience to contradict Disney’s intent. Or, guests may be seeing that if you have valid admission for the day, you can purchase LLMP, and then if you enter only on your party ticket you can use the LLMP without using a day of your regular admission. This is something that’s very difficult for our parks team to test as most of us (for obvious reasons) have Annual Passes.
My expectation would be that if you do not have regular admission at all, you will not be able to purchase LLMP. If you do have regular admission, you may be able to purchase and use LLMP. But, this is counter to Disney’s intent of LLMP availability for guests using After Hours tickets only, and could change at any time. (If it hasn’t already.)
I have this same question! Magic Kingdom Extended Evening Hours are predicted to be April 9 during our trip and I’m hoping this can apply.
This strategy won’t work for Extended Evening Hours. A lot more people qualify to stay late for those compared to the number of ticket-holders for After Hours. So wait times are significantly higher.
After I did the after hours event in 2023, I said I would get it every time. I was so glad they added more dates for my April trip. This is a pretty accurate description of what can be done. The longest line I waited in in 2023 was 15min for 7DMT and that was before the park officially closed. We were the only people on some of the rides it was amazing.
This is the first time I’ve seen a cap number for After Hours. You state it is 3000. For comparison, what is the cap during a normal day?
That 3,000 number is based on asking Cast Members at the event both years, it’s definitely not published anywhere official.
Theoretically, the Magic Kingdom can hold up to 100,000 guests, but a typical average across the year is more like 60,000 guests. So it’s like experiencing Magic Kingdom when it has 95% less people than normal.
To put it into context – the Haunted Mansion handles about 3,000 guests per hour when running smoothly. So if you’re at the Magic Kingdom and Haunted Mansion has an hour-long wait, there may be 3,000 people just in that one line.
After Hours in Magic Kingdom is absolutely worth every penny. If you are on the fence, I can’t recommend it enough. Absolutely my best time in the park was with my daughters After Hours, and it was as much for the fascination we shared in the empty park between rides as it was for the walk-ons for all the rides. Special night.
We also tried After Hours at Hollywood Studios once, and I want my money back!!! HA!
Do you think you could apply this same strategy to Extended Evening hours for Deluxe Guests? We are going Wednesday Feb 7, with EE hours from 10 to midnight.
Hi! I’m curious about this as well. Disney’s website shows what attractions are available during the Extended Evening Theme Park Hours. If that is accurate, some of the attractions in this article are not part of Extended Evening, plus characters and snacks are not part of it either. Becky has an older blog article with Extended Evening plan ideas that may help!
You reposted the article today (January 31, 2024), but list dates it will be offered in “2023.” That’s a typo that should be corrected. I believe you have listed the correct 2024 dates.
Thanks for the catch, Tom. I’m still adjusting to the new year 😉
Is there an article like this for Hollywood Studios? Tickets are purchased for 6/28 🙂
Is that 3,000-person limit official, or is it just a rumored number that matches the estimates bloggers have made based on their observations?
Based on what cast members were saying at the event.
We got After Hours tickets for Feb 20th and I’m so excited! Last year at MK it was so busy, we didn’t get much done. I’m very excited to hit up all the rides with little to no wait! I’ve watched a few vlogs on YouTube and it looks amazing!
My family and I really enjoyed the DAH at HS back in 2019? Forget when we went but we had the best time with low wait times and not worrying about getting fast passes. I would love to try the DAH at MK to see how it compares to EEH. Rides rides rides! So fun.
Did it once.
Best money I have ever spent.