Will Disney prices go up in 2023?

October 24, 2022

In this post we answer a common question: How much does it cost to go to Disney World? I’m going to start with what I’ll call the “Baseline Disney World Vacation.” That’s the vacation I would go ahead and tell a first-timer to book without knowing anything about how the finances look. Then I’ll go ahead and talk about ways to increase and decrease your budget to fit your situation.

Summary [2023 Visits]

While I definitely encourage you to read this entire post, I’ll do you the kindness of summarizing where the three trips come out. Before you read them though—please, please understand these are jumping off points. Many items in here can be made cheaper [by deal hunting or downgrading], more expensive [by upgrading], or nicer but not much more expensive [by deal hunting and upgrading]. Additionally, each of these trips is broken into line items at the end of the respective sections.

Our baseline Disney World vacation for a family of four [two adults, one child 10+, one child 3-9] costs $6,320 [$316 per person per night] in 2023. This includes flights, transportation to and from Disney World, a five-night stay at Pop Century, five day tickets without park hopper, Genie+ at two parks [recommended Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios], and quick service meals, snacks, and two table service meals.

For a family of three [two adults, one younger child], this trip comes out to $5,044. For a family of five [two adults, one older child, two younger children], which requires a different hotel, the trip comes to $7,841.

The expensive trip is more complicated. There are a variety of ways to make your Disney World trip as expensive as you’d like. But for this summary, we’ll focus on a family that upgrades to Contemporary, gets park hopper tickets, adds more days of Genie+ and a couple individual Lightning Lanes, upgrades their dining slightly, and does a ticketed event. This trip comes to:

• $8,298 for a family of three

• $9,958 for a family of four

• $11,378 for a family of five

with the bulk of the additional cost coming from the hotel upgrade.

Our budget family is more flexible. They change their trip dates to value season, cut a day off their trip, and downgrade their hotel to All-Star Movies. They stick to quick service meals. They do only three park days—but they add park hopper to their tickets and still purchase Genie+ two days. As a result, they get their price down to:

• $3,544 for a family of three

• $4,573 for a family of four

• $6,201 for a family of five

Here’s what these nine prices look like in a table:

Wrapping Up 2022

With 2022 mostly behind us a few of you might be interested in how the numbers looked this last year. We’ve changed our methodology a bit from the 2022 numbers so it won’t make sense to compare category-by-category. Instead this year we’re just going to say our baseline trip for 2022 came out to $5731. This means the 2023 trip reflects a 10% increase over 2022, which isn’t much out of line with inflation this year.

The Baseline Disney World Vacation Cost [$6,320]

A baseline Disney World vacation cost for a family of four [two adults, one child 10+, one child 3-9] is $6,320 in 2023. Let’s talk about how we got that number.

First, we pick our dates. I went with June 9 to June 14. It’s early enough in summer to avoid punishing heat, but many kids will already be out of school. This includes a weekend, to save the parents days of PTO. It’s also five nights, which will include four full days in the theme parks.

Next up, flights. Obviously you’ll see a lot of variance in flight prices. I’m flying out of New York and use that to estimate, and there are round-trip flights for $260 per person. That’s not on the low end of prices I’ve seen, but I assume you’ll need some baggage [costs vary by airline], so we’ll treat $1,040 for four round trip flights as a fine estimate.

With Disney’s Magical Express no longer available, you’ll need to cover the cost of getting to and from Orlando International Airport. There are a few different options you can read more about here, but we’ll estimate the cost at $130 round trip.

Onto hotel. Yes, it’s in the “value” category, so I’m doing myself a bit of budgeting help here, but it’s also my go-to Disney World hotel—Pop Century. As I write this, there are no discounts for the selected dates, so the hotel stay booked directly through Disney comes out to $1,268. [Note: I would not recommend booking directly through Disney when there are no discounts without at least shopping around for a better rate.]

Everyone needs park tickets. We’ll buy from Undercover Tourist, an authorized Disney ticket seller. I’m advising five-day tickets without the park hopper option. This means either arrival or departure day [not both] can be spent doubling up on a park you need extra time at. For the three adults [10+] and one child, the tickets come out to a hefty $2,183.

Then there’s the new add-ons, Genie+ and Lightning Lanes. Our current recommendation is to buy Genie+ for Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom, but not for Epcot and Animal Kingdom. Genie+ price varies, but we’ll estimate this around $20 per person per day [pre-tax] which, after tax for two days comes to $172 total.

Since we picked Pop Century—a Disney hotel—we assume you’ll use Early Entry, which will help you avoid needing to buy individual Lightning Lanes.

Finally, food and drink. As of this update, Disney dining plans have not returned. While I’ve never been a fan of those, they were good for estimating food costs. Since it’s been years since we had dining plans, I instead spent time on a spreadsheet estimating food costs and came to $1,527 for my family of four. This includes three meals each day of your trip, including arrival and departure days.

That totals out to $6,320. Roughly speaking, that could cover your entire trip cost, minus getting to and from your home airport.

You may need an extra meal or two, depending on your flight times. And—perhaps most importantly—this budget has no money for souvenirs.

If you were a family of three [we’ll subtract the older child], you’d be looking at $5,044. For a family of five [adding a younger child], you’d have to get a room at Caribbean Beach, and your total cost would go up to $7,841.

Other Possible Costs

While this cost includes all the essentials of a Disney World vacation, it doesn’t include much else. If you’re planning to have a car at Disney World, there are parking fees to consider. Rental cars also obviously come at a cost.

If you plan to do some shopping, be it merchandise from the parks or just vacation shopping at Disney Springs, you’ll need some spending money. The list goes on, and we’ll talk about some more items later.

Baseline Trip Summary of Costs

• 5 Nights Pop Century — $1268

• 5 Day Base Tickets — $2183

• 2 Days Genie+ — $172

• MCO-Disney Transportation — $130

• Flights — $1040

• Dining — $1527

• Total Base Trip — $6320

Before We Go On…

Just as the baseline trip was a starting point, so too are the expensive and budget trips. For example, I can’t think of the last time I paid full price for a multi-night stay at a deluxe hotel. I’ve visited all of them for multiple nights, but I’d only ever book them with some sort of discount, be it from Disney or elsewhere. [To be clear, these are publicly available discounts, I’ve never taken anything from Disney that wasn’t available to the public.]

Relatedly, budget travel is a real rabbit hole. I’ll explain where I draw the lines and why, but you could push it. Do you want to find a room for $100 per night? $75? $50?! Dig deep enough and it probably exists, but it might not be somewhere you want to be [among other things, you always have to consider transit costs to the parks].

On either side of the spectrum, the planning strategy should be the same—figure out what you want, then figure out how you’ll get it. If you can’t get it, tweak and retry. Don’t ignore Animal Kingdom Lodge because of the first number you see at the Disney website—that number can often easily be bested by booking in off-season or by renting Disney Vacation Club points.

Expensive disney World Trip

For the rest of this post, we’re going to focus on our family of four with two adults, one older [10+] child, and one younger child. For this section, I’m just going to give examples of how much different changes to your trip would add to your cost.

Changing Dates [Varies]

I’m going to leave this one to you. You can see the room rate table for Pop Century over at MouseSavers, but suffice to say it varies from $174 nightly to $367 nightly for a standard room. June prices [the prices we’re using] are cheaper than both the spring and winter holidays.

Additional Night [$550]

Adding one night to your stay costs you an additional $550. That’s “only” an extra 10% because the additional ticket costs are very small—only $87 total—at that length, and several things, like flight costs, don’t change at all. The hotel and dining costs are most of the cost of the additional day.

As we go forward, we’ll be sticking with the original trip length. Obviously if you added days and upgraded your hotel or added park hopper, you’d see the increased costs compounded.

Hotel Upgrades [$747+]

Picking a Disney hotel comes down to way more than price, but this is a post about pricing a Disney vacation, so that’s what we’ll focus on. Here are four potential upgrades you could make to your hotel stay, along with how much each would cost on top of the price we found for Pop Century.

• Upgrade to Gran Destino Tower for +$747. Gran Destino Tower is our favorite moderate resort option.

• Upgrade to Wilderness Lodge for +$1452. Wilderness Lodge tends to be one of the lower-priced deluxe options.

• Upgrade to Contemporary for +$2100. Put yourself just a short walk away from Magic Kingdom with this premium option.

• Upgrade to King Kamehameha Club Level for +$3989. We’re also fans of King Kamehameha Club Level at Polynesian, but over five nights you’d be spending an extra $4000 for that stay.

This is a good place to mention doing a split stay. You could upgrade two of your five nights to Polynesian’s Club Level, for example, for “just” $1600. Split stays are our favorite way to visit the deluxe resorts. A chill club level stay at the end of a busy value stay is a perfect combination.

And, as mentioned above, you might be able to find big savings on deluxe stays by by renting Disney Vacation Club points.

Ticket Upgrade [$347+]

Adding park hopper, which would allow you to go between different parks on the same day, would cost $347. Or you could go all the way up to park hopper plus, which for $428 includes other activities—like the Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach water parks—but we don’t recommend this for a first time, five-night visit.

More Genie+ / Lightning Lanes [$344]

We recommend two days of Genie+ and no individual Lightning Lanes for a standard trip. It’s hard for us to recommend much more than that, even for an expensive trip. Nonetheless, you might get Genie+ for two additional days [this is still only four of your five days], as well as two paid Lightning Lanes, spending about $344 more.

Dining Upgrade [$200+]

This one is a little tricky. $200 is about the cost to upgrade two of your quick service meals to table service meals, giving you four table service total. We can’t really recommend more than that because with only four full days at the parks, anything more than one table service meal a day is going to consume a lot of time.

If you’re really into dining you might do two table service meals a day, which would cost about $600 on top of the baseline vacation.

Miscellaneous

Want to Uber instead of taking Disney transportation? That’s $15 to $25 per ride. Or use one of Disney’s Minnie Vans [should they ever return]? $30 to $60 each trip. Some families spend thousands on merchandise.

At Disney World, you’ll find miniature golf and real golf. You can pay to transform your child into a princess at Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique. There’s really no limit to how much you could spend at Disney World.

Expensive Trip Summary of Costs

Clearly there’s a lot of range in how expensive your trip might get, but here’s an example, with the change from the “baseline”:

• 5 Nights Contemporary — $3368 [+$2100]

• 5 Day Park Hopper Tickets — $2475 [+$292]

• Dining — $1729 [+$202]

• 4 Days Genie+ + 2 Individual Lightning Lanes — $516 [+$344]

• MCO-Disney Transportation — $130 [unchanged]

• Flights — $1040 [unchanged]

• Ticketed Event + Misc. — $700 [+$700]

• Total Expensive Trip — $9958 [+$3638]

A similar trip for a family of three would cost $8298 [+$3254 over baseline] and for a family of five $11,378 [+$3537 over baseline]. [Note: You might be curious why the upgrade for the family of five is less than the upgrade for the family of four. It’s simply because the family of five was already paying more to stay at Caribbean Beach, which has rooms for five people.]

Budget Disney World Trip

Just as you can get as expensive as you’d like, you can budget travel just about as low as you’d like. The actual floor to qualify for this would probably be the price of a one day ticket into the park on the cheapest day of the year…plus a Dole Whip for good measure.

But I’ll be making some reasonable decisions for this post. In the future, maybe I’ll do a “cheapest Disney World trip possible” post, but this isn’t it [because, again, that would be awful].

Flights / Transportation [Save $130]

I assume someone who is super budget focused can find a way to save $25 per person on flights and $30 on their roundtrip airport transportation.

Change Dates to Value Season

Dates matter a bit for ticket pricing, and they matter a lot for hotel pricing. While there are some times of the year [Christmas, Thanksgiving, and some other holidays] when flight prices are impacted by date, factors like day of the week and when you book are more likely to impact your flight price. If you’re trying to find the least expensive dates to visit, you’ll want to check out the room rate tables from MouseSavers.

We’ll incorporate date changes into the ticket and hotel savings below.

Change Trip Length

Personally I’m not much of a fan of cutting down to four nights / three full days, but it’s a reasonable thing for a budget-minded traveler to do. As a result, though, you’re going to want to upgrade to park hopper tickets.

We’ll incorporate these changes into the prices below.

Tickets [save $497]

Disney World ticket prices vary by date, and you’ll also see some variance among the different discount Disney World ticket brokers. For this example we’ll cut down to three days [from five], but add park hopper. This comes out to $1686 for a family of four, savings of $497.

Switch to All-Star Movies Resort [Save $660]

Looking at prices at the All-Star Resorts [we’ll use All-Star Movies], the best price you’ll find after mid-February for a four-night stay is $152 per night. You might luck into a discount on that rate. You also might find better rates at these rooms on Expedia or similar sites. For the purposes of this post, the $152 nightly—$608 total for a four night stay—is a good target for a Disney hotel.

While this change in hotel prices seems pretty hefty, keep in mind it’s a combination of:

• changing hotels from Pop Century to All Star Movies

• changing dates from June to late August

• changing stay length from 5 nights to 4 nights

Genie+ / Lightning Lanes [Unchanged]

While you could save the $172 the baseline trip spends on Genie+ / Lightning Lanes, I’d say that our budget family should keep this expense since they cut their trip to just the three days. They’re already saving big on hotel and park tickets because of this change, but then it starts to make more sense to make sure they can pack as much into this trip as possible.

Dining [Save $460+]

For dining, our budget family will drop their two table service meals and instead eat three quick service meals each day. With the day they dropped from their trip, this cuts their dining expenses to $1,067.

How Low Should You Go?

Can you beat that hotel price? Definitely. As I said, you might easily find a lower price when Disney releases discounts or if you book through a site like Expedia. That could knock $100 more off your bill.

You can regularly find Airbnbs for less than $100 nightly, and there are a large number of off-site hotels that see rates drop to around $100 nightly after taxes and fees. [You can read more about Airbnb near Disney World here.]

It’s important to remember, though, that if you’re staying off-site you’ll need transportation to the parks. Many off-site hotels have shuttles, but they tend to be woefully inadequate for a once-in-a-decade [or lifetime] trip.

If you’re driving to the parks, you’ll need to consider extra expenses of driving and parking at Disney World. Additionally, you could Uber for $20 to $40 roundtrip daily. Relatedly, you’ll need to budget for getting between your hotel and the airport—about $30 each way on Uber.

Add in those costs, and the $100 nightly for offsite hotels isn’t much better than what you’ll pay for All-Star Movies, which would include Disney bus transportation to the parks, along with the additional perks of staying at a Disney hotel.

Are some of these hotels going to be nicer than All-Star Movies? Maybe. But I’m a huge fan of the new rooms at All-Star Movies, and in terms of functionality I’d put them up against any budget hotel in the area.

But it’s not as if you’re going to find a luxury experience for $100 per night. Budget travel isn’t about spending as little as possible [if it were we just wouldn’t go at all], it’s about making the best trade-offs. To me, All-Star Movies is a good budget travel option.

There are a handful of situations when a hotel off-site will make a lot of sense. One is when there just aren’t any low-priced Disney options for your dates. Another is if you’re driving and the parking costs make sense or you have a Disney World annual pass that includes parking.

Budget Trip [4 Nights / 3 Days] Summary of Costs

Again, there’s a lot of range in how budget your trip might get, but here’s one example, with the change from the “baseline”:

• 4 Nights All Star Movies — $608 [-$660]

• 3 Day Park Hopper Tickets — $1686 [-$497]

• Genie+ / Lightning Lanes — $172 [unchanged]

• MCO-Disney Transportation — $100 [-$30]

• Flights — $940 [-$100]

• Dining — $1067 [-$460]

• Total Budget Trip — $4573 [-$1747]

For a family of three, a similar trip costs $3544, and for a family of five $6201.

Conclusions

If you’re looking to plan a Disney World vacation, there’s a wide range of prices available to you. For a family of three or four, you’ll probably want to assume you’re spending at least $3500, with $5000-6000 being a comfortable amount, and $10000 being enough to make anyone’s dreams come true. But as we’ve noted several times, you can go way up from those numbers, and you can probably penny-pinch to get under them.

All Your Other Disney World Planning Questions Answered

Don't be overwhelmed by Disney World planning! Take a second to check out our most important content and you'll not only be an expert, but you'll save big $$$ along the way.

Just starting out? Check out our Walt Disney World planning guide! If you're still picking dates, we've got everything you need to know about Disney World crowd calendars. For picking your hotel, check out our Walt Disney World hotels guide.

When it comes time to book we’ll help you find discount Disney World tickets. Decide whether you need a dining plan in our Complete Guide to Disney World Dining Plans! And don't forget to book those Disney World Advance Dining Reservations!

Don't forget to master your Disney World Genie+ and Lightning Lane strategy a few months in advance. We'll keep you out of long lines so you can maximize the magical time in the parks! We've got park-specific guides as well: Magic Kingdom Genie+ and Lightning Lanes, Epcot Genie+ and Lightning Lanes, Animal Kingdom Genie+ and Lightning Lanes, and Hollywood Studios Genie+ and Lightning Lanes.

Know what to ride with our guides to: Magic Kingdom rides, Hollywood Studios rides, Epcot rides, and Animal Kingdom rides! Plus learn about the water parks with our guide to Blizzard Beach and our guide to Typhoon Lagoon! And for some some fun prep, check out our Ranking of Every Ride at Walt Disney World.

Finally, before you head out, be sure to check out our to-the-point packing list, 10 essentials you forget to pack for every Disney trip. And if you're interested in saving, there's no better list than our 53 Ways to Save on your Disney trip from start to finish.