We’re on the pumpkin spice side of Labor Day, and some people seem “surprised” at how low crowds were during the three-day weekend. In this article, we’ll take a look at holiday wait time trends for Walt Disney World, including a look at Walt Disney World’s least crowded holiday (spoiler alert: it’s the one that we’re talking about now).
Average Wait Times by Holiday at Walt Disney World
According to data compiled by app-scraping database thrill-data, Labor Day is the least crowded holiday of the whole year at Walt Disney World. This shouldn’t be surprising to the average observer – children are back in school, vacation days are being saved for the Christmas season, and many families have already visited at some point during the summer. Zooming out a bit, September has the lowest average posted wait times of any month of the year, so that should speak to visitation trends more than whether or not an early-September holiday is popular or not.
Here’s a look at notable holidays and their average posted wait times over the years:
- Christmas Week peak: 56 minutes (December 29th)
- New Year’s Eve: 54 minutes
- Thanksgiving Week peak: 51 minutes (Monday of Thanksgiving Week)
- Christmas Day: 46 minutes
- Presidents Day: 46 minutes
- Thanksgiving Day: 43 minutes
- Good Friday: 41 minutes
- New Year’s Day: 41 minutes
- Columbus Day: 39 minutes
- Veteran’s Day: 39 minutes
- Memorial Day Weekend peak: 38 minutes (Sunday)
- Easter: 37 minutes
- MLK Day: 36 minutes
- Memorial Day: 35 minutes
- Fourth of July: 34 minutes
You get the point – basically, the busiest holidays are New Year’s, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. That isn’t groundbreaking news or data, but the most relevant part of the data for this article is that Labor Day stands alone as having the lowest average wait time of any “major” holiday. Labor Day has an average posted wait time of just 25 minutes across all Walt Disney World attractions.
For Labor Day 2024, Walt Disney World had an average posted wait time of 21 minutes, placing it sort of middle of the pack out of the last 10 Labor Days at the resort. So the next time you see someone sounding the alarm that crowds are low during Labor Day, you’ll know that this is nothing new, and even to be expected – based on data.
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!