It’s looking increasingly likely that September 2025 will deliver the lightest Walt Disney World (WDW) crowds since the post-reopening doldrums of 2021. Several hard signals point the same way: multi-month wait-time trends, aggressive late-summer discounts, school calendars, hurricane-season risk, and new competition across town. Put together, they suggest a “Slowtember” that could rival any month since the pandemic period.
Queue data aggregates have long shown September as the best month for short waits. Thrill-Data’s park pages summarize it plainly: at Magic Kingdom, September posts the lowest average waits of the year (around the mid-20s minutes), with the resort overall hovering near ~30 minutes per attraction in September. Those numbers consistently sit below most other months.
Cinderella Castle in Walt Disney World – Photo Credit: That Park Place
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The most compelling recent comp is last year: multiple analyses found late-August and September 2024 produced the slowest average posted waits since October 2021—the first “post-COVID” low watermark. That’s the baseline September 2025 is chasing, and early-season patterns suggest it can meet or beat it.
Yet September 2025 is looking to be even softer with attendance!
1) Discounts that run deep into September. Disney is dangling unusually value-heavy offers through roughly the first three weeks of the month, including a special “3-Day, 3-Park” ticket (excludes Magic Kingdom) priced from $89/day through September 22, and 50% off kids’ multi-day tickets through September 20. Free Dining is also back for arrivals through September 30 on qualifying packages—another lever Disney traditionally pulls during the very slowest windows. Taken together, that’s a clear “stimulate demand now” posture.
2) School is solidly back in session. Central Florida and much of the Southeast return in early–mid August; Orlando’s Orange County Public Schools’ first day is mid-August this year, and nearby districts (e.g., Duval County/Jacksonville) are the same. With families locked into routine, the weeks after Labor Day are historically soft.
3) Hurricane season optics. September is peak Atlantic hurricane season, and NOAA’s 2025 outlook called for an above-normal season. Even without a storm, that risk depresses late-booked travel and pushes some guests into October–December instead.
4) A powerful new distraction across I-4. Universal’s Epic Universe opened May 22, 2025, and while summer crowds fluctuated there, the gravitational pull of a brand-new park is real—particularly for repeat Orlando travelers who might otherwise default to WDW. Expect some share-shift to continue into September.
Spaceship Earth in the evening in EPCOT at Walt Disney World – Photo Credit: Marvin Montanaro
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But there are other factors in play that might not be obvious at first glance.
September is packed with Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party (MNSSHP), which forces 6 p.m. closes on many dates. That pattern usually suppresses daytime demand and keeps standby waits unusually low until late afternoon (party guests enter at 4 p.m.). September hours show frequent early closures; a 6 p.m. party-day close is standard.
EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival (Aug 28 – Nov 22) brings Friday–Sunday surges, especially at night, while weekdays remain comparatively mellow—another reason early-week September can feel empty.
Tucker, the new baby giraffe just born at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Walt Disney World – YouTube, Attractions Magazine
Public calendars of 2025 one-day pricing identify multiple “low-demand” September ranges. When Disney’s dynamic pricing points to the same mid-September windows as historically cheapest, it’s a market signal of expected softness.
Disney Tourist Blog, one of the few outlets that regularly charts resort-wide wait averages, expects September 2–12, 2025 to be the lowest stretch of the month, the year, and “quite possibly the lowest levels in several years,” noting the same early-September slice last year hit the lowest average posted waits since Oct 2021. If that repeats, September 2025 becomes the new post-pandemic low mark.
The Rivers of America drained Walt Disney World in the Magic Kingdom – Photo Credit: Ron E. Bradley
Broader Orlando lodging data also supports September softness: analysts tracking the market reported September 2024 occupancy under prior-year levels and identified September as the city’s lowest-demand month in short-term rental data that tends to correlate with theme-park crowd patterns.
On the positive side of all of this, for families booking a September trip, you might just find a pretty pleasant experience. If you can swing a weekday visit between Labor Day and mid-September, you may catch some of the emptiest parks you’ll see all year.
Disney World is becoming the type of attraction that Kim Jong Un forces enslaved North Koreans to attend and orders them to pretend they are having a wonderful time.
“Slowtember” may just turn into a permanent thing. Disney was crowing about the profits made off their parks in the last quarterly report. But that same report showed a worrying drop in visitors from a year ago, even during the height of summer. With people going back to school and hurricane season coming in, even fewer people are going to visit either DL or WDW. It won’t matter how much more they try and jack up prices to offset lower numbers, parks make money on the *quantity* of visitors they get.
I expect Q4’s report to be full of spin and cope over how poorly the parks are doing.