Your Best Time to Visit Disneyland: A Complete Guide

Choosing your best time to visit Disneyland Resort is the first step in your planning journey. We are going to walk you through the process of picking your best dates to visit Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park. We will help you find discounts and consider seasonal events so that you can maximize your Disneyland Resort visit. Let’s get started.

Start Planning Your Visit: Choose YOUR Best Time to Visit Disneyland

As you select the best days to visit Disneyland Resort, your choice will come down to a combination of factors and the demands of your own schedule. Let’s help you narrow down when you are going to visit.

Step 1: Check Your Schedule

You have a personal schedule that will dictate which days you can and cannot visit Disneyland Resort. We do not want to get you excited about a discount you cannot use, so cross those no-go dates off of your calendar, and let’s move on.

Now What?

Okay, so you have crossed-out the time periods that will not work for you. Let’s keep narrowing down the best dates for your Disneyland trip.

Maybe you are celebrating a special occasion and already know the approximate dates for your visit. We can still help you select the number of days and point you towards discounts, so keep reading.

Or, maybe you are a teacher who can only go during school breaks. Totally doable! Keep reading to find out which school breaks tend to feature the best discounts or lowest crowds. Let’s move on to step 2.

Step 2: Check for Special Offers and Discounts for Your Best Time to Visit Disneyland

Disneyland offers seasonal discounts on tickets and accommodations. These offers are on the Disneyland website. Before you move on, we recommend that you sign-up for Disneyland Resort emails to be alerted to new and limited-time discounts. Also, check that link above to see what offers are available right now!

No one knows exactly what discounts Disneyland will offer in the future, as Disney generally releases them in response to a slow-down in bookings. Still, looking at recent offers can help you get some ideas. You can find a chart with recent discounts at the helpful MouseSavers website here.

No Disneyland Discounts Available Yet? You Can Still Save Money

Even if Disneyland is not offering any advertised special discounts for your own best time to visit Disneyland, you should still be able to save some money by considering the days of the week you will be visiting.

The Least Expensive Disneyland Ticket Without a Discount

If you are just planning to visit Disneyland Park and/or Disney California Adventure Park for just one day, you can still save by buying a ticket for a less popular day. That is because the price for single day tickets varies by day (weekends vs weekdays) and season.

You can find-out about the variable pricing for one day tickets here and decide if purchasing one of these is the best option for you. The lowest priced single day ticket option is a tier 0 ticket, which you can read about here. Disneyland multi-day tickets are the same price whenever you use them.

Hotel Prices Vary By Day

We will explore the process of booking hotels later in this series, but as you are choosing dates, it may be helpful to get an idea of hotel prices near Disneyland Resort.

Disneyland Resort Hotels are the three official Disney hotels on the Disneyland Resort property. There are also many other hotels close to Disneyland Resort (many within walking distance) that are not owned by Disney. Disneyland Resort Hotels occasionally offer seasonal discounts: you can find those discounts at the same offers link above.

Even if there are no official discounts happening, room rates will still vary both by day of the week and season. This is true for Disneyland Resort Hotels and most other hotels in the area.

If you are planning to book a hotel, try entering some different dates and seeing which ones offer the best prices. For many hotels, including the Disneyland Resort Hotels, weekday dates will be cheaper than weekend dates. However, you may find that some hotels that cater more to business travelers, like those near the Anaheim Convention Center, do have more expensive weekdays.

Step 3: What’s Going on at Disneyland?

Now that you have an idea about what days and seasons will save you some money, let’s consider what’s happening on those days! Disneyland Resort is not the same year-round, so when you choose to visit is going to affect what there is to see and do.

Consider Seasonal Offerings and Special Events

Disneyland loves to celebrate. If you visit during one of their festivals or festive seasons, you will get to experience special decor, entertainment and even enhanced attractions.

Most of these offerings are included with the price of regular admission, so it is like getting bonus Disneyland for the regular price! These special offerings include Holiday Time (winter), Disney California Adventure Food and Wine Festival (spring), and Halloween Time (fall).

Disneyland Resort also offers special “hard ticket” parties like Disneyland After Dark and Oogie Boogie Bash – A Disney Halloween Party. These are very popular separately ticketed events that take place after the parks close!

2025 Disneyland Events

Do those extra celebrations sound good to you? The Disneyland Resort calendar for all of 2025 is now out! We list and explain all of the festival, holiday seasons, after hours events and special celebrations in our post: Disneyland Schedule for 2025: Plan Your Visit!

2025 is also the 70th anniversary of Disneyland Resort! The celebration for this seven-decade milestone starts in May 2025 and continues through summer 2026. We give an overview of the celebration in that same 2025 post.

If you are interested in an extra festive Disneyland Resort, be sure to check-out that schedule.

Nighttime Entertainment

If thinking about Disneyland causes you to picture fireworks over Sleeping Beauty Castle, you will want to take nighttime entertainment into consideration while planning your visit.

Disneyland Park does NOT have fireworks every night in every season. You are more likely to have varied options for nighttime spectaculars if you visit during a busier time with longer hours. During less busy seasons, you are more likely to be able to view fireworks on weekends than on weekdays.

You can check the Disneyland Resort Calendar for the entertainment schedule.

Ride Openings & Refurbishments

Disneyland Resort is growing and changing all of the time. If you are interested in a brand new attraction, you may want to time your visit to after its opening.

In the category of less-fun considerations, you may want to pay attention to which attractions will be closed during your visit. Attraction closures for extended maintenance can be hard to predict, and sometimes visitors are not given much advanced notice. But, you can check the Disneyland Resort calendar for a list of known closures on the days you are considering. Just keep in mind that these are subject to change.

Opening and Closing Hours

Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park do not open and close at the same times year round. In times of heavier attendance, both parks are likely to have longer hours. The trade-off for visiting during more crowded seasons (basically any time U.S. schools traditionally have breaks) is the option of more time in the parks.

Also keep in mind that on days with special after-hours events, the park hosting that event will usually close early to guests not attending the events. You can see a schedule of those events in Disneyland Schedule for 2025: Plan Your Visit!

We also discuss these early closures in: When Does Disneyland Close? If you want to attend these events, schedule your visit during these times. However, if you are not attending these events, know that your potential park hours will be shortened.

As the dates get closer you, can check the Disneyland Resort Calendar for park hours.

Step 4: Think (a Little Bit) About Crowds For Your Best Time to Visit Disneyland Resort

Despite what many many places on the internet would have you believe, predicting crowds at Disneyland Resort is an inexact science. The numbers of guests in the park on any given day has become increasingly hard to predict in recent years. The newer addition of tiered pricing for one day tickets has scrambled conventional wisdom about good days to visit Disneyland Resort.

Busy Times at Disneyland Resort

We are going to offer some broad observations for your consideration. Traditional school breaks for students in the United States are generally busier times. Of those breaks, summer has become moderately less crowded than spring and winter breaks. Long weekends for students, like those for Veterans Day and Presidents’ Day, are also popular with high crowds that seep into the surrounding days as well.

Halloween Time has become very popular at Disneyland Resort. The early days at the end of August through the middle of September are not too crowded, but attendance usually increases as Halloween gets closer. October is surprisingly busy. (Also keep in mind that Oogie Boogie Bash parties during this time will affect park hours.)

Changes to one-day ticket prices and Magic Key block-out dates have also shifted more guests from weekend to weekday visits. So despite conventional wisdom about Disneyland crowds, weekends are not always (or even usually) busier.

The Best Approach to Crowds at Disneyland

Frankly, Disneyland Resort is probably going to feel busy whenever you visit. At seventy years old, the “Happiest Place on Earth” is more popular than ever. You can certainly have a less crowded visit by avoiding some of the days we detailed above, but we also recommend preparing yourself with a kind of go-with-the-flow mentality.

Visiting during busy times does have some benefits. Parks are staffed with more cast members, attractions are operating at higher capacity and more special entertainment is scheduled.

The reality is that you are going to encounter lines at Disneyland whenever you visit. You can save time in line with virtual queues, mobile ordering and Lighting Lanes. The best way to beat the crowds and long waits whenever you visit is to arrive early (here is what we like to do during the opening hours of Disneyland) and stay late. We also recommend that you see the busy parks like being at a great party: everyone wants to be there to enjoy some fun together. So have some fun!

Step 5: Choose The Number of Days You Will Visit Disneyland

You have hopefully narrowed down your best time for visiting Disneyland Resort, now let us help you decide how long you will visit! You can buy Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park tickets in increments of one to five days.

Disneyland Resort Multi Day Tickets

The cost of visiting the Disneyland Resort parks decreases per day as the overall price of the ticket increases. So, a five-day ticket is going to cost more than a one-day ticket to Disneyland, but if you divide that five-day ticket by five… each individual day costs less than a one-day ticket.

You do not need to use all of the days on a multi-day ticket consecutively. We have an article about it right here: Must I Use My Disneyland Ticket on Consecutive Days? In fact, we think an ideal multi-day visit involves rest days between park visits. We wrote all about it here: Maximize Value: Take a Rest Day at Disneyland.

The Ideal Number of Days for a Disneyland Visit

The ideal number of days for a Disneyland visit is obviously going to vary from guest to guest. We find that three days is a nice amount of time for one-time or infrequent guests to feel like they have experienced all of their must-dos and had time to repeat favorites.

Our perfect trip involves spreading those three park days over five days of an Orange County, California vacation. Remember, you can take days-off between park visits. So we recommend alternating days in the Disneyland Resort park with days having fun at Disneyland Resort with no ticket at all and visiting other local attractions like Orange County beaches.

Of course, we think any day in Disneyland is a great one, so you will need to decide what works with your visit schedule! We are going to walk you through purchasing those tickets in our next stop on this planning journey.

Thank you for reading this Step-by-Step Planning Post on the Best Time to Visit Disneyland

We hope you have found this post helpful and picked-up some tips on the best times to visit Disneyland. Stick with us for our next part of this planning journey: buying those tickets we just considered and making park reservations. Thanks again for reading, and see you real soon!