Walt Disney World's Halloween party and Food and Wine Festival have their 2026 dates

Walt Disney World has confirmed the 2026 dates for its two big autumn events. Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party runs on selected nights at Magic Kingdom from 7 August to 31 October, and the EPCOT International Food and Wine Festival runs from 27 August to 21 November. One is a separate evening ticket built around trick-or-treating and a parade for young families. The other is included with a normal EPCOT day and leans more towards adult food and drink, so it helps to tell them apart before you plan an autumn trip.

The party has run since 1995, the festival since 1996

Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party first ran as a single night on 31 October 1995. Disney’s Imagineers built it as a gentler counter to the scarier Halloween events elsewhere in Orlando, notably Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, and shaped it around fun and trick-or-treating rather than scares. That first night brought out the Headless Horseman, who still rides through Liberty Square during the party today on a black Percheron horse.

It caught on. Disney added more nights over the years, three by 1999, five by 2001 and around fifteen by 2005. By 2010 it had become the multi-week fixture it is now. The 2026 run of 38 nights across three months is the biggest the calendar has ever been, and the 7 August start is the earliest the party has ever begun.

The Food and Wine Festival started a year later, in 1996. The first one was a month-long event that replaced a smaller single-weekend wine festival, put together by EPCOT’s then-head George Kalogridis to bring visitors in during a quiet autumn stretch. It opened with 25 marketplace booths, cooking demonstrations, wine seminars and a list of more than 200 wines. Some of those first dishes are still on the festival three decades on, among them Canada’s cheddar cheese soup, Poland’s pierogi and Germany’s apple strudel. It’s now the longest of EPCOT’s four yearly festivals, close to three months, with the free Eat to the Beat concert series as its headline draw.

How the 2026 party ticket works

The party runs from 7:00pm to midnight on 38 selected nights, nine in August, thirteen in September and sixteen in October, with Halloween itself among them. A party ticket lets you into Magic Kingdom from 4:00pm, so you get three hours in the park before the event proper begins.

It’s a separate, hard ticket, not part of a normal day. A standard Magic Kingdom ticket or an Annual Pass won’t get you in, and annual passholders have to buy a party ticket like everyone else, though eligible passholders and Disney Vacation Club members get a small saving on the earlier-season nights. You don’t need a daytime park ticket to go, though. The party ticket stands on its own, so a family who isn’t at Magic Kingdom that day can still turn up just for the evening.

The ticket isn’t cheap, and it costs more on the busiest nights, October and Halloween especially. Tickets are bought through Disney directly or a UK Disney-authorised agent, and they’re already on sale, so the popular dates are worth booking ahead if the party is part of your plan.

What happens on a party night

Once you’re in, trick-or-treating is unlimited and free with the ticket. There are around fifteen sweet stations across the park, marked with large lit-up signs, and you’re handed a themed bag on the way in. Most stations give out fun-size sweets. There’s a proper allergy system too. Children with a food allergy can pick up a teal bag, every station carries allergy-friendly treats and dedicated centres hold a wider allergy-friendly selection.

The evening’s big set pieces all return for 2026. Mickey’s Boo-to-You Halloween Parade starts at 8:15pm. Disney’s Not-So-Spooky Spectacular fireworks are hosted by Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Hocus Pocus Villains Spelltacular puts the Sanderson Sisters from the film on the castle stage, and the Cadaver Dans, a Haunted Mansion barbershop quartet, sing their way around the park. Characters come out in Halloween costume, including villains you won’t usually meet on a normal day.

New for 2026 is a Stitch dance party on the Rockettower Plaza Stage in Tomorrowland, with Lilo and Angel from Lilo & Stitch. The idea is that Stitch has got hold of Lilo’s costume trunk, and every accessory he pulls out switches the theme, so the dance party keeps changing through the night.

Costumes on party nights

Party nights are one of the few times adults can dress up at Walt Disney World. On a normal park day only children aged 13 and under may wear a costume. On a party night, guests of any age can.

There are rules. Costumes have to be family-friendly, which rules out props that look like real weapons, anything sharp or pointed, costumes that drag along the ground and capes below the waist. Adults and teenagers can’t wear a full face mask, though costume headwear is fine as long as it doesn’t cover the face. If a younger child’s costume has a mask, it has to leave both eyes visible and full side vision clear, which is worth checking on an off-the-shelf costume before you pack it. You can dress as a favourite character, but you can’t pose for photos or sign autographs as though you were the real one. Anything that breaks the rules can be turned away or asked to be changed at the entrance.

The late finish is the main thing to plan around

None of the party is meant to frighten young children. Disney built the event to be gentle and it has stayed that way, with no gore, no jump-scares and nothing like the horror attractions elsewhere in Orlando. The spookiest it gets is the Sanderson Sisters on stage and Jack Skellington over the fireworks, both firmly in Disney-family territory.

With a toddler the thing to plan around is the late finish, not anything frightening in the show. The party runs to midnight, a long way past a young child’s bedtime even with the 4:00pm early entry. Families travelling with little ones often build the day around an afternoon nap or a rest back at the hotel, then head in for the evening and leave part-way through rather than stay to the end. Going in with a plan to leave when your child flags usually works better than trying to last until midnight.

Whether the extra ticket is worth it

The party is a real extra cost on top of whatever else you’re spending, so whether it’s worth the money is a fair question, and it’s one visiting families come down on differently. It tends to suit families who’ll use the shorter queues during party hours to ride a lot in a few hours, and who want the trick-or-treating and the parade as a one-off. It makes less sense for families who’ll be worn out by early evening, or who mainly want it for rides they could go on any ordinary day.

The Hocus Pocus show and the fireworks get picked out as the highlights, often worth watching more than once in a night. The recurring complaint is price. Party tickets have climbed a good deal over the past decade, and larger families buying several of them increasingly find them hard to justify.

Food and Wine is included with a normal EPCOT day

The Food and Wine Festival works differently. There’s no separate festival ticket. A normal EPCOT ticket or a valid Annual Pass gets you into the festival and its included entertainment, and only the extras cost more, the food and drink at the booths, the scavenger-hunt cards, the concert dining packages and the seminars.

The heart of it is the Global Marketplaces, festival-only food and drink kiosks themed to countries and regions, set around World Showcase and in other parts of the park. Outlets tracking the build expect more than thirty booths for 2026, opening in waves rather than all at once, the first at the festival’s launch and a few more through late September and early October. Full menus were still coming together, but a few dishes are already confirmed, among them a street-corn-style dumpling, a grilled bushberry-spiced prawn skewer with coconut-chilli sauce at the Australia marketplace and a Kirschwasser torte with cherry-brandy buttercream at the Alps marketplace.

The scavenger hunts are the clearest fit for young children

Two walking games run the length of the festival and both work well with young children. Remy’s Ratatouille Hide & Squeak sends you round World Showcase looking for fifteen hidden figures of Remy, the little chef from the Ratatouille film, matching each one to a food symbol and sticking it on a map you buy at the start. Pluto’s Pumpkin Pursuit is a separate Halloween-themed hunt in the World Celebration, World Nature and World Discovery areas, away from World Showcase so the two don’t overlap, where you match character-decorated pumpkin stickers to pumpkins dotted around. Each carries a small charge, and you get a keepsake whether or not you find them all, which takes the pressure off a toddler who loses interest halfway. Emile’s Fromage Montage, a cheese-themed tasting trail with a stamped card, returns as well, though that one is more of a grazing route for the grown-ups.

The concerts and food booths lean adult

The festival’s headline entertainment is the Eat to the Beat concert series, three shows a night at the America Gardens Theatre in World Showcase, free with park admission and seated first-come-first-served on the lawn. The 2026 line-up runs from 27 August to 16 November, a little short of the festival’s close, and mixes new names with familiar ones like Boyz II Men and The Beach Boys. A family can happily watch, but the acts and the crowd are aimed at a general, largely adult audience rather than children, so it’s a nice thing to catch from the side if you’re passing rather than a reason to bring a toddler to EPCOT for the evening.

The food booths, the core of the festival, are really the grown-ups’ part. The format is small plates and drinks, often including wine, ordered and eaten standing around World Showcase, which suits adults grazing their way round far better than a young child. The two things visitors flag most are queues at the busier kiosks and a shortage of anywhere to sit, since World Showcase doesn’t add seating for the festival, both more of a problem with a buggy or a tired child in tow. A few booths do carry something plainer a child will eat, pasta or a bratwurst or a cheese plate, but that’s the exception rather than the point of the event.

For a family with young children, the useful way to think about Food and Wine is as a normal EPCOT day with a scavenger hunt and maybe a snack from a booth added on, not an event to build a trip around. It adds something to a day you were already spending at EPCOT. The Halloween party is the one that can justify planning dates around it, for the parade, the fireworks and the trick-or-treating, if the late night and the extra ticket suit your family.

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