A Realistic Budget For Your 2024 Disney World Trip

Some BIG changes are coming to Disney World in 2024 and you won’t want to miss out.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is set to open that year in Magic Kingdom, along with new cabins at Fort Wilderness Resort & Campgrounds, new Disney Vacation Club villas at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort, and more. You might have a whole list of reasons why a 2024 Disney World vacation is a MUST for you — but how much will it cost you?

Let’s break down a realistic budget for a 2024 trip to Walt Disney World right now!

Disclaimer

Keep in mind that all of this is based on the prices we found on the date of our search for the writing of this article. Prices are subject to change, however.

Our Family

For purposes of this budget, we’ll be pricing things out for a family of 4 — 2 adults and 2 kids (ages 5 and 8). To make it somewhat comparable to our 2023 budget, we’ll search for a week-long vacation (7 days, 6 nights) in mid-July 2024 and our family will get park tickets for 5 days.

Things We Are NOT Including

For this post, we will NOT be including the cost of transportation to/from Walt Disney World and our family’s home. That can vary dramatically based on where you’re located, whether you’ll be driving or flying, and a multitude of other factors.

So keep in mind that gas prices, rental car prices, flying costs, baggage fees, and (if flying) the cost of transportation from the airport to Disney World (since the Magical Express is no longer offered) will all need to be added to the budget outlined below.

Alright, now let’s get into the budget.

Hotel

For our hotel, we’ll stick with a Moderate Resort to keep things somewhat in the middle in terms of cost. Remember that costs can vary a LOT depending on what dates you pick and what hotel you want to stay at. For our example, we’ll pick Disney’s Port Orleans Resort — Riverside in a standard room for 7 days and 6 nights. We chose a trip from Saturday, July 13th through Friday, July 19th.

A standard room for those dates was priced at around $300 per night. That brought the hotel total (without tickets or anything else) to $1,809. With tax, it comes out to $2,035.15.

Tickets

Now, let’s talk tickets. Our family only needs tickets for 5 days. We’ll add the Park Hopper option so our family can go between parks. Let’s assume the 13th and 19th are travel days, so they will want to be able to use those tickets from the 14th through the 18th. It seems the cheapest option for that is to have the ticket “start” on the 14th.

The total for 5-day tickets for our family with the Park Hopper option ends up being $3,042.74.

Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lanes

Now, let’s talk about Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lanes. Genie+ is the service that has replaced FastPass+. With Genie+, you pay a certain amount (which varies depending on the day and depending on whether you buy a multi-park option or a single-park option). With Genie+, you can make a Lightning Lane reservation (one ride at a time) to skip the standby lines at many rides.

Individual Lightning Lanes allow you to buy the ability to skip the standby line ONCE at some of Disney World’s most popular rides (which are NOT included in the standard Genie+ service). The prices for these vary depending on the date, ride, and park. You can only buy a maximum of 2 Individual Lightning Lanes per day.

Keep in mind that the pricing for this is subject to change. Plus, right now you can only buy Genie+ or Individual Lightning Lanes on the day of your visit (not in advance), but some changes are set to hit the systems in 2024 that could change that.

Still, let’s take a look at what these might cost in 2024. In 2023, the multi-park Genie+ option ranged in price from $23-$27 from July 14th-18th (pricing was $25, $23, $23, $27, and $27) so we’ll use those same costs for 2024, and anticipate that our family will buy the multi-park Genie+ option each day. That total is $500 for all 5 days.

Also, we’ll assume that our family will buy just 1 Individual Lightning Lane per day. We took an average of all the Individual Lightning Lane prices from July 14th-18th, 2023 for the 5 rides included in that system and the average was $16. If we anticipate that the family will spend around $16 per person on an Individual Lightning Lane for all 5 days, that works out to $320 for the trip.

So that’s a total of $820 on Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lane costs. Note that Disney does charge tax on Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lane purchases though. We’ll set aside $15 extra dollars for that, bringing the total to $835.

Food and the Disney Dining Plan

Starting on January 9th, 2024, the Disney Dining Plan will be available once again in Disney World! This is essentially a way to pre-pay for your meals. You pay a certain amount to obtain Dining Plan credits, which you can then redeem for specified items — like a Quick Service meal or a snack.

Whether the Dining Plan is worth the cost for you and your family will depend. It all depends on the cost of the Dining Plan versus the cost you’d ordinarily spend on food in the parks.

If you often like to bring your own food/snacks, like to split meals, prefer to eat small meals, and don’t usually order the most expensive items on the menu, then the Dining Plan may not make the most sense for you. But you’ll want to do some calculations to figure it out!

For our family, we’ll go ahead of say that they’re going to get the Disney Dining Plan, and we’ll opt for the Standard Dining Plan. The standard plan includes 1 Quick Service meal, 1 Table Service meal, and 1 snack/non-alcoholic meal per day per person. It also comes with 1 resort refillable mug per person.

The Standard Dining Plan costs around $94.28 per adult, per day and $29.69 per child (ages 3 to 9) per day. The total for the Quick Service Dining Plan for our family would be around $1,487.64 for their trip.

Keep in mind that doesn’t include tips for the Table Service meals. Let’s set aside another $120 for that. And we’ll include $50 for any miscellaneous snacks or other food items our family might want to throw in. That brings the total to $1,657.64.

Click here to see why some people are saying they will NOT use the Disney Dining Plan

MagicBand+

MagicBands used to be offered for free in Disney World with every hotel stay, but that’s no longer the case. And now there are newer devices — called MagicBand+ — that can add fun little interactive touches to your day (like light effects when watching the fireworks).

Plus, you can link them to your account to pay for your purchases, use them to scan into the park, and more.

A plain, single-color MagicBand+ typically costs around $34.99. But some designs can be priced upwards of $64.99. We’ll assume our family will just buy the plain bands — which will cost them $139.96.

Souvenirs

There is a lot of cool merchandise to buy in Disney World. From spirit jerseys to ears, toys, Loungefly bags, popcorn buckets, Crocs, and more, our family may not be able to resist bringing back a souvenir or two!

For this trip, we’ll set aside $500 for merchandise — around $125 per person.

Other Costs to Consider

Other costs you’ll want to consider factoring into your trip include rideshare services. You can certainly use Disney World’s free bus, boat, monorail, and Skyliner transportation to get around, but if you need a more direct way to get to certain places, or don’t want to use Disney’s transportation, a rideshare service may be something to turn to.

You’ll also want to consider whether something like Memory Maker will be right for you. While taking PhotoPass photos is free (Cast Members will take these photos for you at various locations throughout the parks), downloading them is not. Purchases of Genie+ now come with all ride photos taken on the day of the Genie+ purchase, but other PhotoPass photos won’t be included.

So if you want to bring home ALL of the memories, you may want to purchase Memory Maker. It’s $169 when bought in advance and includes all of your photos and videos within 30 days of activation.

Total

In 2023, our total budget was $7,081.70. That did not include the Dining Plan though (we priced out food separately). So what’s our budget like for 2024?

Here’s the breakdown:

• Transportation: Not included
• Rideshare: Not included
• Memory Maker: Not included
• Hotel: $2,035.15
• Tickets: $3,042.74
• Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lanes: $835
• Food/The Disney Dining Plan: $1,657.64
• MagicBand+: $139.96
• Merchandise: $500

That brings our total to $8,210 (about $1,000 more than in 2023).

Remember, this can change dramatically depending on several factors — the time of year you choose to visit, the number of people in your group, the hotel you pick, how you get to Disney World, your meal preferences, and more.

But we hope this post has given you a bit of a general idea of what you may spend when visiting the Most Magical Place on Earth in 2024.

Want to Save Money?

Looking to save some cash on your trip? Be sure to look for deals and discounts that can pop up from time to time on hotels and tickets (and even dining!) that could save you a whole bunch of money.

And consider reaching out to our friends at Mouse Fan Travel! They’re experts in the field with over 20 years of vacation planning experience, and they can help take a bunch of the stress out of the entire booking process for you!

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