Our May 2025 Walt Disney World crowd calendar offers a guide to the month, weeks to visit & avoid, weather, new attraction openings & closures, and the kickoff of summer. Plus, other info & tips for Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios. (Updated April 12, 2025.)
We like the month of May at Walt Disney World. For most people, earlier in the month is going to be better. However, even right around Memorial Day, crowds at Walt Disney World aren’t nearly as bad as you might expect for a holiday weekend at Walt Disney World. We’ve had wonderful visits during May in terms of weather, crowds, and entertainment.
The other good news is that May sees a reduced slate of refurbishments, longer park hours, and only moderate crowds. Most schools are still in session during May, so crowds are typically fairly uniform for most of the month. While some things are still up in the air for May 2025 at Walt Disney World, we do have a pretty good idea of what to expect. There’s actually a lot more upside to May, especially as compared to other summer months…
May Weather at WDW
Our experience has taught us that the biggest make or break for May is the weather. I think that’s true when traveling to Walt Disney World during this time of year, in general. Low temperatures for May range from 64 to 70 degrees, with highs averaging 85 to 89 degrees. Those are just averages–temperatures in the 90s and high humidity aren’t unheard of.
As demonstrated by the “comfortable” band on this page for May, weather is generally on the upper end of nice (like you cold weather climate folks expect from a Florida vacation). It can creep into “unpleasant” territory with some regularity, with it being warm and above 64% of the time in May.
The potential for unseasonably hot weather in May is demonstrated with weather forecasts from last year that regularly topped out above 95 degrees and 75% humidity. Days like like make May a little questionable in terms of weather, but if you’re looking at a summer vacation and it comes down to May versus June, July, or August, May is by far the safest option. So there’s that upside.
While not technically weather, May is the first month of the year that you can get your money’s worth if you’re staying at Yacht or Beach Club. Technically, you have to spend 22.7 hours per day in Stormalong Bay (sorry, we don’t make the rules) to get appropriate bang for your buck, so at least the hotter weather helps with that!
May Special Events at Disney World
Throughout May, you can enjoy the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival; this annual event will likely run until Memorial Day. Flower & Garden Festival features marketplace food booths, gardening entertainment, and beautiful ambiance to Epcot. While it’s not for everyone, it’s one of my favorite events of the year at Walt Disney World…and I don’t even enjoy gardening.
There are no runDisney races in May, as the running ‘season’ is over until October. It’s also the tail end of the youth events season at Walt Disney World. As you can see from the ESPN Wide World of Sports calendar, the Cheerleading Worlds and Dance Worlds occur at the end of April, with the Cheerleading and Dance Summits being the first two weekends in May. There’s also the Memorial Day Soccer Tournament May 24-26, 2025.
These are major dance and cheerleading competitions that boost attendance at the parks and occupancy at the hotels, usually the All Stars and Coronado Springs. However, the impact on crowd levels in the parks isn’t significant as a whole–and tends to be overblown based on anecdotal experiences, which can be quite bad.
Normally, Memorial Day weekend is the official kick-off of summer for Walt Disney World. That will once again be true this year, albeit delayed by a few days as Walt Disney World “cedes” that weekend to Universal Orlando, which will be opening Epic Universe on the Thursday before Memorial Day.
A few days later, “Cool Kid Summer” will start at Walt Disney World on May 27, 2025. There’s currently not a lot of “there there” to this marketing campaign, save for very aggressive discounts and character programming aimed at families with young children. The latter is unlikely to move the needle on summer visits, but the former certainly will.
May REFURBISHMENTS & NEW ATTRACTIONS
In terms of other attractions that will be closed during May, check the Walt Disney World Refurbishment Schedule. There are only a handful of ride closures this spring, the biggest of which are Test Track and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. The latter is closed until 2026 for a complete retrack.
The former is currently closed for the Test Track 3.0 Ride Reimagining. This fan-favorite thrill ride is receiving an update inspired by World of Motion, and went down for that work in mid-June. Walt Disney World hasn’t announced a reopening date, but work appears nowhere near finished and the current timeframe is Late Summer 2025 is the target. Our expectation is that it reopens sometime between the second half of July and October 1, 2025.
The good news is that Walt Disney World is not a veritable construction zone…yet. The new development cycle is just starting–but doesn’t really impact the guest experience (again, yet). Animal Kingdom is starting to ramp up projects, but Magic Kingdom and Disney’s Hollywood Studios haven’t. Some of those projects will start in May 2025, but no matter when you visit this month, the worst you’ll see are some walls up around Dino-Rama and Muppet Courtyard.
The biggest new additions at Walt Disney World are both in Magic Kingdom: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and TRON Lightcycle Run. Both attractions now offer a standby line, as does Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind. These attractions also have Lightning Lane line-skipping–as do almost all popular attractions at Walt Disney World. We highly recommend consulting our Guide to Lightning Lane Single & MultiPass at Walt Disney World & FAQ for everything you need to know.
When it comes to new additions for Summer 2025, the bad news is that nothing is debuting until the end of the month. Villains Unfairly Ever After and Little Mermaid: A Musical Adventure will both open on May 27, 2025, although soft openings or previews are possible for both starting the previous week.
Unfortunately, there’s no chance that Disney Starlight Night Parade will debut in May 2025. That’s the big summer draw, and it’ll likely debut between late June and mid-July 2025. The reimagined Test Track will come online after that, probably between the second half of July and October 1, 2025.
On the plus side, if you’re doing a bigger-picture Orlando trip, you will be able to experience paid previews of Universal’s Epic Universe. We highly, highly recommend reading that and doing what you have to do in order to attend a soft opening of Epic Universe. Although not every attraction is guaranteed to be open during these technical rehearsals, they should be the best time to experience this brand-new theme park–and it’s not everyday that you get to attend a sneak peek at a new park. It probably won’t happen again in Central Florida in our lifetimes!
If you’re visiting later in the month, you’ll be able to experience the official opening of Epic Universe, which debuts on May 22, 2025. We’d also recommend attending this, although not quite as enthusiastically if you haven’t already made your reservations and bought tickets. Epic Universe will likely be packed its first week, with crowds not letting up until sometime in June.
For an overview of what else is on the horizon, see What’s New & Next at Walt Disney World in 2025 & Beyond.
May 2025 DISNEY WORLD CROWD CALENDAR
We’ll start this free May 2025 Walt Disney World crowd calendar section with the same preface as other months–skip ahead a few paragraphs if you’ve already read it. There’s no color-coded crowd calendar here because they’re unreliable at this point. If we just had a visual crowd calendar graphic here, many of you would only look at that and not read the accompanying explanation that covers what you might actually expect. That’d be doing you a disservice.
Disney doesn’t release official attendance numbers, so crowd calendars use things like school schedules, airport traffic statistics, hotel pricing & occupancy, and other indicators as proxies for crowds. For years, this approach worked and made crowd calendars reliable. Walt Disney World attendance followed an identifiable pattern that tracked with the aforementioned proxies.
More recently, wait times don’t always reflect actual crowds because Disney has become adept and more sophisticated at manipulating both attendance and crowd flow. Think of this as the difference between the actual temperature and the “feels like” temperature, but with crowds. We can still actual crowd and attendance patterns, but not wait times. The latter are what most of you likely care about (the “feels like” crowds), but it’s more difficult to accurately forecast wait times via Walt Disney World crowd calendars.
In a normal year, May is the shoulder season at Walt Disney World, a slower time between the peak travel seasons of spring break and summer. Crowds typically are at their highest levels at the beginning and end of the month, and even then, rarely go above 5/10. The last two years, May has been one of the 3 slowest months of the entire year.
May 2025 should be an incredibly attractive time to visit, with below-average crowds. The biggest spikes will occur as a result of events at the ESPN Wide World of Sports: the Summit Championship (May 1-4, 2025), D2 Summit (May 9-11, 2025), Special Olympics Florida Summer Games (May 16-17, 2025) and Disney Memorial Day Soccer Tournament (May 24-26, 2025). Typically, participants arrive in the days and week leading up to these sporting events.
As noted above, these do not have much impact on overall crowd levels for Walt Disney World as a whole. There simply are not enough participants with park tickets to move the needle in a major way. However, they can contribute in a major way to localized congestion and crowd levels, spiking wait times at various attractions. if you visit the same park as their entire (or large portions of) their group attends your perception of their impact might be very different.
Meaning that if you have the misfortune of getting in line for Haunted Mansion behind a huge group of cheerleaders, dancers, flag football players, etc., it can spike both the wait time for that particular attraction and feel unpleasant for various reasons. (Ask us how we know!!!)
Once the cheer and dance events end, you can expect even more of a consistent and predictable lull. That should be around May 12-21, 2025. It’s difficult to predict crowd levels for these dates with precision, but there’s every reason to expect this to be the slowest stretch of the month–and one of the least busy of the year–based on historical precedent and a lack of events. Even before May 12, it’s not as if the parks will be busy–crowds should be below-average for those dates, too. Shoulder season is a great time to visit.
Last year’s shoulder season ran from roughly April 15 until the Friday before Memorial Day. For reference, every single week in May of last year saw below average crowds (including those coinciding with cheer and dance events), with the three weeks leading up to Memorial Day being the slowest and having 1/10 to 2/10 crowd levels. Crowds rebounded the last week but were still well below average (3/10).
One change we know for certain is that crowds won’t be low in mid-April, as Easter isn’t until April 20, 2025. Accordingly, our expectation is that shoulder season starts on Earth Day (April 22, 2025) and runs through late May 2025. Same idea, but one less week of low to moderate crowds.
It’s impossible to say with any degree of confidence whether the 2025 shoulder season will be slower than last year. I’m inclined to predict that it will. This has been up-and-down in the last couple of years, largely dependent upon the degree to which Disney discounts.
There’s a high probability that tourists will postpone visits to Central Florida until Epic Universe opens, creating a “calm before the storm” scenario at both Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando in the first few weeks of May 2025. We’ve seen this happen with other big additions (e.g. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge).
Given that, it seems like the smart money is predicting lower crowd levels for the 2025 shoulder season. The stretch leading up to Memorial Day should still be pretty slow, with crowd levels under 3/10 for the majority of days.
As you might notice, the end of shoulder season is listed above as being May 21, 2025 and the opening of Epic Universe is May 22, 2025. This may not seem coincidental, but actually, it is. At least, to the extent that our shoulder season crowds prediction was made prior to Universal announcing the opening date for Epic Universe.
In actuality, the timing of both is not coincidental. The Thursday before Memorial Day is often when crowds start to pick up, which is also why Universal Orlando chose to open Epic Universe on that day. As far as how the opening of Epic Universe will impact crowds at Walt Disney World, it’s difficult to say–there’s not exactly a ton of precedent for how new competing theme parks alter attendance at Walt Disney World.
Our best guess is that opening weekend of Epic Universe will be slower than a normal Memorial Day weekend at Walt Disney World, as Universal sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Many locals have purchased tickets and booked hotel stays for Epic Universe that weekend, and tourists are unsurprisingly doing likewise. This dynamic will exist throughout the summer, but it’ll be most pronounced through Monday, May 26, 2025.
You might’ve also noticed that the two new Villains and Little Mermaid stage shows open on May 27, 2025 at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. This will result in a slight spike in crowds at DHS (and only DHS) on that date. Less so if there are AP previews or soft openings the previous week. We expect a negligible impact on overall wait times at Disney’s Hollywood Studios as a result–it’ll mostly be a spike in congestion, and long lines for those two shows, in particular. The same will happen again from May 30 through June 1, 2025 as more locals are off work for the weekend.
In a nutshell, 1/10 to 3/10 days are much more likely than 5/10 to 7/10 days for the duration of May 2025. Lower crowds can be expected through mid-June, as there’s a slight spike for Memorial Day and then usually another drop thereafter. Even Memorial Day isn’t bad by holiday weekend standards–it’s not on par with holidays like Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day, or Veterans Day. Those holidays are arguably “lower profile” but end up being bigger attendance boosters.
For daily park recommendations, we’d direct you to Best & Worst Days to Do All Parks at Walt Disney World. Magic Kingdom, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and EPCOT typically follow patterns and picking the right (and avoiding the wrong) days can make a big difference, no matter what time of year (uncrowded or crowded) that you visit.
Beyond all of that, conventions and group events are another factor, but none of this really moves the needle on crowds or wait times in a major way. In short, the entirety of May 2025 should see below-average crowds, with the middle of the month being an especially great time to visit.
May PRICING & DISCOUNTS
In terms of promotions, there are room-only discounts for Annual Passholders, Florida residents, and the general public in May. See All Current Discounts at Walt Disney World for the various resort deals.
Otherwise, when it comes to pricing, May is fairly average prior to Memorial Day weekend. For 1-day park tickets, May is “regular” season prior to the holiday weekend (read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post for multi-day ticket recommendations to avoid having to deal with seasonal pricing). For hotels, pricing is also typically at the “Regular Season” rate.
Overall, the month of May at Walt Disney World demonstrates that everything is relative. From our perspective, it’s a fairly appealing time to visit Walt Disney World in many regards. Yes, the weather is generally worse than February through April, but park hours are longer, summer entertainment begins to start, new additions have debuted, fewer refurbishments are occurring, and crowds are still manageable.
Plus, if you’re comparing weather to the summer months that follow, May is actually significantly better. (See, it’s all relative.) For this reason, if you’re looking at visiting during the summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day), the end of May is actually one of our top picks. In other words, if you’re limited to traveling during the summer and May is an option, it’s when we recommend visiting Walt Disney World then!
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
Your Thoughts
Do you agree or disagree with our thoughts on the month of May at Walt Disney World? Are you looking forward to Summer 2025 at Walt Disney World? Do you like to visit in May? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!