Our guide to April 2025 at Walt Disney World offers a free crowd calendar, weeks to visit & avoid, weather, ride refurbishments, and tips for navigating the chaos of Easter and Spring Break. Plus, info for Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios. (Updated April 4, 2025.)
If you’re considering a spring visit, April crowds fluctuate depending upon whether Easter occurs in April. During most years, that’s the case. In the last decade, Easter has happened during March in only 2016 and 2024. This year, Easter falls on April 20, 2025.
You can still expect the days before and week after that to be among the busiest times of the year at Walt Disney World. Spring Break crowds will descend upon Walt Disney World throughout both months. And with Easter occurring in late April 2025, the season is going to be even longer than normal.
The upside of Easter is that you it means somewhat of a special event in April, with a few offerings for the holiday. It isn’t much, but the Easter Bunny (and Mrs. Bunny) meet and greet in Magic Kingdom and decorated eggs at the resorts are enjoyable. Still, we’d gladly trade these for lower crowds!
Here’s what else you can expect during April at Walt Disney World, organized by category…
April Weather at Disney World
Outside of the first week, April is exceptional when it comes to weather. Lows at the beginning of the month are in the low-60s and creep up into the mid-60s by the end of the month. High temperatures range from 80 to 85 degrees. Take a look at the “comfortable” band on this page–those are the kind of averages we like to see!
Obviously, anomalies are possible in both the “too cool” and “too hot” directions, but largely, April is one of the more comfortable months weather-wise in Orlando. April is more predictable than March and May, both of which are more likely to have unseasonable cold snaps (in the case of March) or early humidity (in the case of May). While all 3 months are great for weather, April is the “safest.”
April Special Events at Disney World
If you’re visiting on Easter or the weeks immediately before it, it’s also worth noting that there are special festivities for the holiday. Take a look at our Guide to Easter at Walt Disney World for more on the beautifully-decorated eggs, seasonal foods, Magic Kingdom meet & greet, pre-parade, and everything else you can expect from Easter in the parks and hotels.
Much more significant than that is the EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival, which continues in April and brings a vibrant atmosphere to Epcot, but there’s not much else. The annual event will run for the entire month of April, continuing until just after Memorial Day.
There’s also the runDisney Springtime Surprise event from April 3-6, 2025. That event will have an impact on crowd levels, as we’ll discuss below. Speaking of sports, you should always check out the ESPN Wide World of Sports calendar before booking your trip–and especially, your resort. This year, the ICU Junior World & World Cheerleading Championships and The Cheerleading Worlds will be held April 25/26 through April 28, 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. 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. (Meaning that you could think they’re a huge negative if you’re stuck in line for Haunted Mansion behind a group of 100 cheerleaders…or you might never see a single participant during a weeklong trip.)
Finally, there’s After Hours at Magic Kingdom, After Hours at EPCOT and After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. These occur sporadically and, as the names suggest, are held after park closing. They have minimal impact on daytime crowd levels, but result in a slight bump in crowds during the evening ‘mix-in’ time.
We do not recommend changing your plans because of After Hours at Magic Kingdom or EPCOT, but you might want to do DHS on a different evening. Normally, that park is great for lower wait times at the end of the night, albeit to a lesser degree on After Hours dates. It’s also possible to have two showings of Fantasmic (a strategy game-changer) on nights when After Hours is not occurring.
Aside from Easter week, expect above average park hours in April 2025. It’s worth noting that park hours are a decent proxy for projected attendance levels, so the later a particular park is open, the higher Disney expects the crowds to be. Plan accordingly. For more tips on what times of year might be good for visiting, check out our Walt Disney World Crowd Calendars post for the best and worst months of the year.
April Refurbishments & New Rides
When it comes to attractions that will be closed, 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.
Otherwise, there’s not much for routine maintenance during Spring Break season. That’s normal–Walt Disney World’s refurbishment ‘season’ is typically winter, with more projects occurring in late summer and early fall. The other good news is that Walt Disney World is no longer a veritable construction zone, as the new development cycle is just starting–but doesn’t yet impact the guest experience. 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, so guests visiting this month will miss them.
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 (all three recently ditched their virtual queues). 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 2025, the bad news is that absolutely nothing will be open by April 2025. Villains Unfairly Ever After and Little Mermaid: A Musical Adventure won’t debut until May 27, 2025, and those are the earliest openings. Disney Starlight Night Parade will likely debut in the second half of June 2025, and the reimagined Test Track will come online after that.
On the plus side, if you’re doing a bigger-picture Orlando trip, you might get lucky with soft openings of Universal’s Epic Universe. But even that is a longshot unless you’re visiting later in the month. The absolute earliest start date for previews of Epic Universe is April 16, 2025–and even that date might not happen, or could just be for Annual Passholders.
For an overview of what else is on the horizon, see What’s New & Next at Walt Disney World in 2025.
April 2025 Crowd Calendar for Disney World
We’ll start this free crowd calendar section with the same preface as other months—skip ahead a few paragraphs if you’ve already read it. We don’t have a color-coded crowd calendar here because we don’t put much reliance on them anymore. You shouldn’t, either. 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.
While they can be useful tools, crowd calendars are one small piece of a much larger puzzle. We no longer choose our own Disney travel dates based exclusively upon crowd calendars and we’d likewise discourage you from doing so. Crowd calendars are increasingly unreliable because of the way Disney manipulates attendance patterns, staffing, closures, and ride capacity.
Walt Disney World doesn’t release official attendance numbers, so crowd calendars utilize info 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 WDW crowd calendars.
While April is not the Spring Break month for most colleges and schools with static Spring Break schedules, many schools in the United States schedule their Spring Breaks around Easter. This means that the couple of weeks around Easter (particularly the week before) will be two of the busiest of the year.
Normally, the week after Easter would still likely be busy, as many school districts–particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest–have their Spring Breaks that week. This will still happen to some degree in 2025, but will be less pronounced because Easter is falling 3 weeks later than last year. Having Spring Break occur the week after Easter 2025 would put the break too close to May, and the end of the school year.
Expect the two busiest weeks of the month to be the last two. The week leading up to Easter is usually the busiest week between mid-January and mid-October, and often the busiest all the way until Christmas (usually worse than Columbus Day/Fall Break, Veterans Day/Jersey Week, and Thanksgiving).
The worst week of the entire Spring Break season will be April 11-20, 2025. This is a fairly safe prediction year in and year out, regardless of what else happens. Easter week has been the busiest of spring break season for as long as we’ve been covering Walt Disney World, although mid-March when Orange County is out has come close a couple of times.
Although there are some straggler school districts, expect April 22, 2025 (Earth Day!) to be the unofficial end of the Spring Break season. That will be partially–but not fully–offset by new ticket deals, but crowd levels should still be trending downward for the remainder of April 2025. We’d expect average or below (4/10 to 5/10) crowd levels that week as a result. It’ll be worse than the first couple of weeks, but better than the previous week or most of March.
The downtrend should continue for the remainder of the month and into May 2025. Our expectation for all of those weeks in the lead-up to Memorial Day is average crowds in the 3/10 to 4/10 range. That’s about what happened last year, and the end result was a slow 6-week stretch from late April through May. We aren’t predicting crowd levels that are that low, but 1/10 to 2/10 crowd levels are more likely than 4/10.
Backtracking to the beginning of the month, crowds should be fairly light leading up to the peak week of Easter. Current crowd levels are already bearing this out, as daily crowd levels from March 31 through April 4 have been 1/10 to 4/10.
That’s really low for this time of year, even with the new-normal of runDisney races not really having much of an impact on attendance. It’s unlikely that next week (April 6-10, 2025) will be even slower, but that would normally be the case. Given the low baseline, we’re expecting another week of crowds that are moderate or below. Crowd levels should pick up on Friday, April 11, 2025–but even that weekend won’t be truly busy.
See our list of the 10 Best & Worst Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World in 2025 & 2026 for additional recommendations about dates to go and ones to avoid around this time of year (and others).
Finally, be aware of the above-referenced cheer and dance events at ESPN Wide World of Sports from April 25 through 28, 2025. In the days prior to the events and during them, you can expect elevated crowd levels to varying degrees in the different parks.
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. 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!!!)
These groups can have a major impact on resort room availability, as there are tons of attendees and they take up huge blocks at the All Stars, Coronado Springs, and a few other hotels. That, in turn, reduces inventory there and pushes other people to different hotels.
Long story short, a lot of hotels can sell out completely, causing planners to freak out that the parks are going to be chaotic and crowded. Which can be true…sometimes. But there are two things to keep in mind. The first is that the majority of guests in the parks at any given moment always come from off-site.
The second is that the youth groups are primarily participating in sporting events at the ESPN Wide World of Sports, not going to the parks. So to some extent, they are occupying rooms and displacing guests who would otherwise visit the parks. (See Why Are Walt Disney World Resorts Sold Out? for a more thorough explanation.)
All things considered, April 2025 will be busy at Walt Disney World, but not nearly as bad as March 2025 as a whole. Easter will be the busiest week of the Spring Break season, but the rest of the month shouldn’t be too terrible. Above average as a whole, but not insanely busy.
April Pricing & Discounts
In terms of promotions, don’t expect much. April is too early for the Free Disney Dining Plan promo (the holy grail of Walt Disney World discounts) offered in the fall, and slightly too early for aggressive ticket discounts. Instead, you’re typically looking at the tried and true room-only discount offer for all of the month outside of the Easter holiday window.
In terms of pricing, April is again normal outside of the first week. For 1-day park tickets, most of April is “regular” season; for hotels, pricing is also at the “Regular Season” rate. You might be able to do better scoring deals off-site, because April is a fairly competitive month for Orlando tourism.
Ultimately, we normally warn of April being one of the worst months to visit Walt Disney World. However, that’s largely because of Easter. Other than that week-plus, we’ve found that fewer school districts–at least, the ones that have a big impact on Walt Disney World crowds–have their breaks in April. This can make it an okay month to visit, especially if you want to get in before the summer heat arrives, which seems to happen earlier every year.
Beyond crowds, April is actually appealing for other reasons. The weather is great, refurbishments are rare, and Epcot is looking great with Flower & Garden Festival. If last year was any indication, the week of April 2025 after Spring Break season ends should be absolutely fantastic–the intersection of pleasant weather (knock on wood–it’s Florida, so heat and humidity are always possibilities!), low crowds, and Walt Disney World in bloom.
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 April? Do you think it’s average, exceptional, or somewhere in between? Enjoy visiting for Easter? 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!