A SURPRISING Look at New Year’s Day Magic Kingdom CROWDS in Disney World

Happy New Year!

New Year’s Eve Fireworks

The Holiday season is one of the busiest at Walt Disney World, with events including Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, Jollywood Nights, and EPCOT’s International Festival of the Holidays (including performances of the Candlelight Processional) drawing in huge crowds. Of course, the Holiday season culminates on New Year’s Day! We headed into Magic Kingdom on the first day of 2025 to see what the crowds were looking like.

As we entered the Magic Kingdom on New Year’s Day, we found early crowds to be not as bad as we expected.

New Year’s Day Crowds

After checking out Main Street, we went to Adventureland and the crowds were decent.

Adventureland

Unfortunately, Pirates of the Caribbean was closed. We went to check the My Disney Experience app and saw that Space Mountain was also temporarily down.

Pirates of the Caribbean

When we went into Frontierland, we were shocked to see that Big Thunder Mountain Railroad only had a 45-minute wait. This is shocking for two reasons, the first being that it is New Year’s Day, and the second being that the attraction is about to close on January 6th and won’t re-open until 2026.

Big Thunder was only a 45-minute wait!

Up next, we headed into Tomorrowland, and we were happy to see that Space Mountain open again. Just a little after noon, all rides in the park were back up and operating.

Space Mountain re-opened

Another look at some of the crowds in Tomorrowland.

Tomorrowland Crowds

Overall, we were pleasantly surprised by the crowds at Magic Kingdom, as wait times were much lower than we expected, especially when compared to New Year’s Eve the night before.

New Year’s Eve crowds 2024 in EPCOT

2025 is set to be a massive year at Disney World, so make sure you continue to follow along with Disney Food Blog to stay up to date on all the latest Disney news!

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