In this post, I’m going to breakdown how much it costs to take a vacation to Disneyland in 2025. While a substantial portion of Disneyland’s guests are locals driving for a single day or single night, this post focuses on guests who want to make a vacation of their visit. Figuring out the exact costs can be a bit tricky, but we’re here to walk you through the steps to start budgeting for your next trip. Read on to learn about the costs of a vacation to Disneyland in 2025!
About This Post
This post is not a planning guide. We have a separate Guide to Planning a Trip to Disneyland.
In this post, I set out to outline a reasonable budget for a trip to Disneyland Resort, in California, in 2025. The bulk of the post works through six categories of spending—Flights, Airport Transit, Hotel, Park Tickets, Lightning Lanes, and Food and Beverage. The most glaring omission is merchandise, so add that in if you’d like.
For my calculations, I focus primarily on a family of four with 3 members over 10 years of age and one under 10 (3 adults, one child), but I provide per person/adult/child costs in most cases, and I add compiled figures for families of 3 and 5 at several points.
For each category of spending, I give three final figures—budget, baseline, and expensive—for different types of spending. The baseline trip is the plan I’d throw together without knowing anything about someone’s budget. It includes flights, transit to/from the airport, a nice hotel off-site, park tickets, Lightning Lanes, and dining.
There’s going to be flexibility in all of these categories—sometimes within your control, sometimes not. The spots where we can usually opt to spend a little less or a little more are what help us put together the “budget” and “expensive” trips. But I suspect most people will pick and choose—go budget on the hotel, but expensive on Lightning Lanes, for example.
This post is a starting point. You can spend less than the budget trip comes to. You can spend more than the expensive trip comes to.
At the beginning of the post I offer a quick summary of how the numbers shake up. At the end of the post, you’ll find more detailed summaries of each trip type.
Summary (2025 Visits)
Here’s what pricing looks like for the baseline trip for a family of four:
Flight - $1400
Roundtrip Airport Transit - $200
4 Nights Hotel - $1578
Park Tickets - $1736
Lightning Lanes - $344
Food and Beverage - $1,253
Total - Family of 3 - $5,296, Family of 4 - $6,511, Family of 5 - $7,599
The “budget” trip cuts down costs on hotels, tickets, Lightning Lanes, and dining to get down to - $4,147 (family of 3), $5,168 (family of 4), and $6,085 (family of 5).
The “expensive” trip makes upgrades in all those categories, spending $7,439 (family of 3), $8,880 (family of 4), $10,148 (family of 5).
Trip Length and Visit Dates
Disneyland is a great destination for trips of most any length. You can squeeze the highlights of both parks into a single day, if you’d like. You can spend up to a week without getting too bored. But overall we have a pretty straightforward suggestion for trip length—four nights. This is three full days, allowing for one full day at Disneyland, one full day at Disney California Adventure, and one day split between the parks.
I’m not going to belabor this topic too much. While you could save money with a shorter trip or spend more on a longer trip, I think that most people should start by looking at a four-night trip. To that end, I’m not going to talk too much about longer/shorter trips in this post.
For all three (budget, baseline, expensive), I’m going to stick with summer travel dates (June 12-16, 2025), as is my norm.
If you can visit during off-season, that might help your budget. But prices for multi-day Disneyland tickets don’t vary by date, and your hotel choice will matter much more than your specific dates when it comes to hotel pricing. Same with flights—California doesn’t have a full “off” season for travel, and factors like your airline options and when you book your flight are likely to matter more than when you travel.
Flights and Airport Transit
The top two airports for visiting Disneyland are LAX (Los Angeles International) and SNA (John Wayne Airport). SNA is closer, but smaller. Which costs more will depend on what airport you’re flying from. Based on some quick searches on Google Flights, I’m going to estimate flights at about $350 per person, roundtrip.
Then you have to get from the airport to your hotel. Unlike Walt Disney World, where there are well-established shuttle options, the Disneyland options are a bit murkier. While I’d do a quick google search and see if any trusted professionals have recent reviews of shuttle options, I mostly accept that I’m going to be taking an Uber from SNA or LAX to Disneyland.
From SNA, and Uber will cost around $50. From LAX, it’ll be closer to $100. We’ll use the higher figure for this post. This will be $200 roundtrip between the airport and Disneyland.
Hotels
Probably the biggest difference in budgeting a Disneyland vs. Disney World vacation is the hotel selection process. Disney World has about 20 hotels across three tiers, with rooms starting under $100 per night and going up into the thousands. Disneyland has three Disney-operated hotels, and their post-tax nightly rates start around $430 (Pixar Place Hotel), $480 (Disneyland Hotel), and $700 (Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel and Spa).
For my chosen travel dates (June 12-16), the total hotel costs for these three options come to:
Pixar Place Hotel - $2,555
Disneyland Hotel - $2,799
Grand Californian - $4,488
Those links are to our reviews of the hotels.
But the typical thing to do when vacationing at Disneyland is not to stay on-site. In fact, there are a few hotels off Disneyland property that are closer to the parks than Pixar Place Hotel and Disneyland Hotel. Check out the simple map below and then the Google Maps look at Disneyland park, and you can see a lot of hotel options on the east along Harbor Boulevard.
My personal go-to on Harbor Boulevard is The Anaheim Hotel. It isn’t luxurious, but it’s reasonably priced and about a 7-minute walk from the Disneyland campus. As of this update, The Anaheim Hotel doesn’t have my selected dates for booking. But a four night stay in late May comes to $988 for four nights.
In between the prices of The Anaheim and the Disney hotels, you can find my favorite luxury chain—JW Marriott. I’ve never had a chance to stay at this one, but at a 15-minute walk from the Disneyland campus, the JW Marriott, Anaheim comes to $1,578 for four nights.
You can get cheaper than The Anaheim Hotel if you go a bit farther from Disneyland. You can…well, it’s actually hard to get more expensive than Disney’s Grand Californian.
So, what to pick for this post? I’m a huge fan of Pixar Place Hotel. In particular, the “Premium View” includes views of “Resort or Theme Park.” Don’t ask me why they don’t just have Theme Park view rooms in their own category, but if you get a Theme Park View…wow.
So for the purposes of this post, here’s the hotel picks I’m going with:
Budget - The Anaheim Hotel - $988
Baseline - JW Marriott, Anaheim - $1,578
Expensive - Pixar Place Hotel, Premium View - $3,089
Finally, consider a split stay, where you spend some of your trip at one hotel and some at another. Because everything is so close, it isn’t too hard to move luggage, even between a Disney hotel and a non-Disney hotel.
Tickets
These next three items—tickets, Lightning Lanes, and dining—vary significantly by party size. While I’ll note per-person prices, my “standard” setup is two adults, a child over 10, and a child under 10. I’ll note baseline prices for families of other sizes, too.
For tickets, you can deduce based on the dicussion about trip length, above, that I recommend three-day, park hopper tickets. I recommend these regardless of your budget, but for the sake of completeness, we’ll say our family on the budget trip gets three-day tickets without park hopper, while our family on the expensive trip adds a fourth ticket day to fit some rides into a travel day.
We’re ignoring Lightning Lanes here—those get covered in their own section next even though you can purchase Lightning Lane Multi Pass with your ticket.
I recommend buying tickets from Undercover Tourist because they tend to have the best available prices. And, indeed, as I write this post they have an “adults at kids’ prices” promotion going on. This brings our prices to:
Budget - 3 Day, No Hopper - $365 per person / $1,460 total
Baseline - 3 Day, Park Hopper - $434 per person / $1,736 total
Family of 3 - $1,302 total
Family of 5 - $2,170 total
Expensive - 4 Day, Park Hopper - $485 per person / $1,940 total
Lightning Lanes
Disneyland Lightning Lane Multi Pass is typically priced at $30 per day. One big difference between Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disney World and at Disneyland is that the Disneyland version covers a smaller fraction of the rides—less than half. The upside of this is that you can and will do a lot even without Lightning Lane Multi Pass.
You don’t have to decide on Lightning Lanes ahead of time at Disneyland. You might want to take the time to read our Disneyland Lightning Lane Strategy Guide to see if they’re a necessary part of your trip. You could also wait and see how your first day at the parks goes—how are crowd levels, how quickly are you getting around, how early are you waking up—and then considering buying Lightning Lanes the next two days.
I think even our guests on a budget should splurge on one day of Lightning Lane Multi Pass—they’ll spend that day solely focused on Lightning Lanes. I think a good baseline is to get it for two days, which eases some of the stress of cramming two parks worth of Lightning Lanes into one day. And if you’re willing to spend a bit more, get it for all three days.
Lightning Lane Single Pass is currently offered on two rides at Disneyland—Star Wars Rise of the Resistance (priced around $26) and Radiator Springs Racers (priced around $21). I think a family on a budget should have no worry about fitting these two rides in without paying for Lightning Lanes. A reasonable baseline is to get one—we’ll say Rise of the Resistance. And if you’re spending more money, then getting both makes your days a little easier.
Altogether, this brings us to
Budget - 1 Day Multi Pass, No Single Pass - $30 per person / $120 total
Baseline - 2 Days Multi Pass, Rise Single Pass - $86 per person / $344 total
Family of 3 - $258 total
Family of 5 - $430 total
Expensive - 3 Days Multi Pass, Both Single Pass - $137 per person
Food and Drink
For food and drink, we’ll plan 12 meals (three each of the three full days, three combined for the two travel days). We’ll also plan for a small snack budget (4, 6, and 8 snacks per person for our three budget categories).
While Disneyland has some great table service meals, dining probably won’t be as big a focal point as it is for many people at Walt Disney World. This partly a function of trip length—shorter trips mean fewer meals and less time to spend on long meals. It’s also a function of Disneyland only having three Disney hotels—most guests who don’t stay at those hotels don’t want to go out of their way to the hotels for a table service meal (though there are options in the parks).
I think having one table service meal—probably make it a character meal—is a good baseline for a Disneyland trip. I think a family on a budget will do fine skipping table service and sticking to quick service. And a family who wants to spend a bit more money would be reasonable to do three table service meals during their trip (though personally I wouldn’t do this regardless of budget size because I just don’t think it’s a great use of time).
I just use example meals from Disneyland’s restaurant menus to come up with budgets based on these parameters. The restaurants and menus are all available here if you want to do your own math.
The totals come out to:
Budget - Only Quick Service, Snacks - $276 per adult, $172 per child / $1,000 total
Baseline - 1 Table Service, more Snacks - $345 per adult, $218 per child / $1,253 total
Family of 3 - $908 total
Family of 5 - $1471 total
Expensive - 3 Table Service, even more Snacks - $469 per adult, $296 per child / $1,703 total
Summaries of Disneyland Trip Costs
And this brings us to the final numbers…
Summary of Costs for the Baseline Trip to Disneyland
Flight - $350 per person
Roundtrip Airport Transit - $200 total
4 Nights Hotel - $1578 total
Park Tickets - $434 per person
Lightning Lanes - $86 per person
Food and Beverage - $345 per adult, $218 per child
The totals for families of example sizes come to (adults are 10+):
Two Adults + One Child — $5,296
Three Adults + One Child — $6,511
Three Adults + Two Children — $7,599
Summary of Costs for the Budget Trip to Disneyland
Flight - $350 per person
Roundtrip Airport Transit - $200 total
4 Nights Hotel - $988 total
Park Tickets - $365 per person
Lightning Lanes - $30 per person
Food and Beverage - $276 per adult, $172 per child
The totals for families of example sizes come to (adults are 10+):
Two Adults + One Child — $4,147
Three Adults + One Child — $5,168
Three Adults + Two Children — $6,085
Summary of Costs for the Expensive Trip to Disneyland
Flight - $350 per person
Roundtrip Airport Transit - $200 total
4 Nights Hotel - $3089 total
Park Tickets - $485 per person
Lightning Lanes - $137 per person
Food and Beverage - $489 per adult, $296 per child
The totals for families of example sizes come to (adults are 10+):
Two Adults + One Child — $7,439
Three Adults + One Child — $8,880
Three Adults + Two Children — $10,148
All Your Other Disneyland Planning Questions Answered
Don’t be overwhelmed by Disneyland 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 Disneyland Planning Guide. When it comes to hotels, we’ve got reviews of all three Disney hotels: Disneyland Hotel, Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa, and Disney’s Pixar Place Hotel. As for tickets, check out where to find discount Disneyland tickets.
Know what to ride with our: Disneyland Rides Guide and Disney California Adventure Rides Guide. And just as important, know how to get on the best rides without the wait with our Disneyland Lightning Lane Strategy! For the complete guides to a day at the park, we have a One Day Disneyland Itinerary and a One Day Disney California Adventure Itinerary.
We always recommend arriving at the parks early. If you can get access to Early Entry at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure, you’ll have the most time in the parks. Even without those bonus hours, you’ll need to know Rope Drop Strategy at Disneyland and Rope Drop Strategy at Disney California Adventure.
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.