Does Day of the Week Matter at Disney World?

We ran the actual numbers: WaitScout's realized daily crowd index, park by park, day of week by day of week, over the last 102 measured days. The honest finding is that day of week moved these numbers too little to call a winner at any of the four parks — differences this small could plausibly be chance, given how few weeks of data back each day-of-week average. The table and the reasoning are below; the statistics behind that call are in the Methodology section.

This article describes what already happened. Check the live crowd calendar for your actual travel dates.

The data and what's excluded

Every figure below is WaitScout's realized daily crowd index, for Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom, over the 102 days from June 5 through September 14, 2026. Special Ticketed Event nights — after-hours hard-ticket parties — are excluded from every average below: EPCOT had 8 such nights in this window, Hollywood Studios 16, Magic Kingdom 18, and Animal Kingdom 0.

This window sits entirely in summer and early fall — it does not describe December, spring break, or holiday weeks.

The realized numbers, park by park

Park	Day	Avg. index (0–100)	Sample days
Animal Kingdom	Sunday	70.0	15
Animal Kingdom	Monday	72.7	15
Animal Kingdom	Tuesday	67.1	14
Animal Kingdom	Wednesday	63.6	14
Animal Kingdom	Thursday	67.9	14
Animal Kingdom	Friday	71.3	15
Animal Kingdom	Saturday	72.7	15
EPCOT	Sunday	68.7	15
EPCOT	Monday	71.3	15
EPCOT	Tuesday	68.6	14
EPCOT	Wednesday	70.8	13
EPCOT	Thursday	68.6	7
EPCOT	Friday	72.7	15
EPCOT	Saturday	72.0	15
Hollywood Studios	Sunday	74.0	15
Hollywood Studios	Monday	75.7	14
Hollywood Studios	Tuesday	78.6	14
Hollywood Studios	Thursday	78.5	13
Hollywood Studios	Friday	82.7	15
Hollywood Studios	Saturday	77.1	14
Magic Kingdom	Sunday	70.8	12
Magic Kingdom	Monday	70.0	11
Magic Kingdom	Tuesday	75.6	9
Magic Kingdom	Wednesday	75.7	14
Magic Kingdom	Thursday	74.3	14
Magic Kingdom	Friday	75.6	9
Magic Kingdom	Saturday	74.0	15

EPCOT's Tuesday and Thursday rows round to the same figure above (68.6) and are in fact tied to three decimal places (68.571 each) — not a near-tie, an exact one on the data we have. Hollywood Studios' Wednesday is left out of this table entirely: it had only 1 non-party-night Wednesday in the whole 102-day window (nearly every Wednesday there was a Special Ticketed Event night), too thin to average at all.

Why we're not naming a best day

The numbers above do move around — Animal Kingdom's Wednesday sits about 9 points below its Saturday, for instance. But moving around is not the same as being a reliable pattern, and we checked: at every one of the four parks, the day-to-day spread within each day of week is wide enough that the differences between days could plausibly just be chance, given how few weeks of data sit behind each day-of-week average (the exact test and its results are in the Methodology section, for anyone who wants to check our work). We are not going to tell you Wednesday is Animal Kingdom's quiet day when the data doesn't actually back that as a reliable pattern.

Hollywood Studios' six measured weekdays (Wednesday excluded) run 74.0 to 82.7. Four of those six days — Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday — sit above the 63.6–75.7 range covered by Animal Kingdom, EPCOT, and Magic Kingdom's own day-of-week averages; Monday (75.7) matches that range's top exactly, and Sunday (74.0) falls inside it. Among the four parks' own day-of-week tests, Hollywood Studios comes closest to clearing a significance threshold, but not by every test used — the Methodology section has the exact results.

What to check instead of memorizing this table

This table describes 102 days that already happened, in one season, and shows day of week is not the lever this data can support leaning on. To plan an actual date:

1. Check the live crowd calendar for your actual dates rather than a historical day-of-week average.
2. Compare your candidate dates against each other rather than looking for a universal "best" day.

WaitScout is an independent planning tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by The Walt Disney Company. All park names are used for identification purposes only.

Methodology

Realized daily crowd index from crowd_observed.observed_index_0_100, June 5 through September 14, 2026 (102 days), joined against park_schedule to exclude any date with description = 'Special Ticketed Event' for that park. Sample sizes per park/day-of-week cell range from 7 to 15 days; Hollywood Studios Wednesday (n=1) is excluded from every figure and from the significance test below.

Significance test: a one-way ANOVA (sample variance, matching scipy.stats.f_oneway) of daily index on day-of-week, run separately per park (Animal Kingdom, EPCOT, Magic Kingdom: 7 day-of-week groups; Hollywood Studios: 6 groups, Wednesday excluded), cell sizes 7 to 15 days, threshold p < 0.05. Results, in the order the parks appear in the table above: Animal Kingdom F(6,95) = 1.15, p = 0.338; EPCOT F(6,87) = 1.03, p = 0.411; Hollywood Studios F(5,79) = 2.05, p = 0.080; Magic Kingdom F(6,77) = 1.51, p = 0.186. None clears p < 0.05, though Hollywood Studios comes closest. A second, rank-based test (Kruskal–Wallis, which doesn't assume the index is normally distributed) run on Hollywood Studios alone returns p = 0.022 — below 0.05 on its own, but this article ran four such tests (one per park), and 0.022 does not survive a standard correction for testing four parks at once, so it is noted here, not treated as a finding. Magic Kingdom's other six days (excluding Monday, its lowest) span 4.9 points on the 0–100 scale (70.8 to 75.7).

The full queries and raw outputs behind every figure in this article, including the ANOVA inputs and the claim table mapping every flagged sentence to its source query, are in docs/content/dis141-queries.md in the WaitScout repository.