Disney and Epic Universe in One Trip: Measure Your Kids First
Every version of this question I see online gets answered with days and dollars. How many park days do you need, what do the tickets cost, can you fit it all in a week. Those are fine questions. They are not the first question.
The first question is “how tall are your kids?”
I want to be straight with you before we go any further. I have not been to Epic Universe. We have done Universal Orlando with our kids, so I know what that resort feels like with a stroller and a tired four year old in it, but Epic is new and I have not walked it. What I have done is sit down with Universal’s own height chart and read it the way a parent reads it, which is to say I looked for my kids’ names in the numbers. What I found changed my answer to this question completely.
What Universal’s height chart actually says
Epic Universe has eleven attractions with posted ride requirements. Here is the whole list, straight from Universal.
No minimum height
- Constellation Carousel
- Fyre Drill
34 inches
- Yoshi’s Adventure
40 inches
- Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge
- Mine-Cart Madness
- Hiccup’s Wing Gliders
- Curse of the Werewolf
- Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry
48 inches
- Stardust Racers
- Dragon Racer’s Rally
- Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment
Read that again with a specific child in mind.
If your kid is 36 inches, there are three rides in that entire park they can get on. A carousel, a water shooting boat, and Yoshi. That is it. There is also the Astronomica water play area in Celestial Park and two shows, The Untrainable Dragon and Le Cirque Arcanus, which anyone can sit through. But rides, actual rides, three.
If your kid is 42 inches, the park opens up a lot. Mario Kart, Mine-Cart Madness, the dragon gliders, the Harry Potter ride, the werewolf coaster. That is a real day.
Forty inches is the line. Almost everything at Epic Universe sits on one side of it or the other.
Now compare that to Magic Kingdom
Magic Kingdom has seven attractions with a height requirement. Seven. In the whole park.
TRON at 48 inches, Space Mountain at 44, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at 40, Big Thunder and Seven Dwarfs’ Mine Train at 38, Barnstormer at 35, Tomorrowland Speedway at 32.
Everything else is open to everybody. Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, It’s A Small World, Peter Pan’s Flight, Jungle Cruise, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, The Mad Tea Party, Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, Carousel of Progress, the whole of it. A 34 inch kid can ride forty-some attractions at Magic Kingdom and three at Epic Universe.
This is not me being a Disney partisan. It is just what the two parks are. Magic Kingdom was designed in 1971 around the idea that a grandmother and a toddler ride the same boat. Epic Universe was designed in 2025 around launch coasters and motion simulators. Both are good at what they are. They are not the same kind of place.
The part I keep thinking about
I have written before about the measuring stick, about standing at the entrance to a ride with one kid who clears it and one who does not, and watching the second kid’s face do the thing it does. At Magic Kingdom that moment stings and then you walk ninety seconds and get on something else together. Dumbo is right there. The carousel is right there.
At Epic Universe, if your little one washes out at Mine-Cart Madness, where exactly are you going? Back to the carousel you already rode twice?
That is the thing nobody tells you in the should-you-do-both posts. It is not that your small kid will have a bad time at Epic Universe. It is that you will spend the day managing it. Child Swap is real and it works, Universal does it well, but Child Swap means one parent rides while the other one stands in a room with the kid who cannot. You paid full price for both of you to do that.
And the waits are not short
Epic Universe is still new enough that demand has not settled. On a random Sunday this month, October 11, the park averaged a 53 minute wait across the day. Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry peaked at 185 minutes. Mine-Cart Madness hit 180. Mario Kart hit 165.
Three hours. For one ride. With kids.
Express Pass exists and it helps, but at Epic Universe it runs a few hundred dollars per person on top of admission, which means a family of four can easily add seven or eight hundred dollars to a single day. That is a number worth saying out loud before you decide.
So when does doing both actually work?
If your kids are all comfortably over 48 inches, do both. Genuinely. Epic Universe is the most ambitious park anybody has built in decades and your family can ride all of it. The two resorts sit about fifteen minutes apart and nothing runs between them, so getting from Disney to Universal is on you, a car or a rideshare. Once you are on Universal property, though, you do not need a car at all. Universal runs a free shuttle to Epic Universe that goes down Kirkman Road in dedicated bus lanes, about a fifteen minute ride, from two hours before park opening until an hour after CityWalk closes. The Loews hotels on property run their own direct buses on top of that.
If your kids are 40 to 48 inches, you can do both, but give Epic one day and keep your expectations honest about the three 48 inch rides you will be swapping on.
If anybody in your group is under 40 inches, I would skip Epic Universe this trip. Not forever. Just this trip. If you want Universal in the mix, Islands of Adventure is the better call, because Seuss Landing is genuinely built for little ones and the Caro-Seuss-el and One Fish Two Fish have no height minimum at all. Cat in the Hat and the Trolley Train are 36 inches, which a lot of three and four year olds clear.
And if your kids are tiny, two and under, three and barely on the chart, just do Disney. You are not missing anything at Epic Universe that they can ride. Spend the money on an extra Disney day and a character meal.
If you are doing both, the things that actually matter
Tickets changed for 2026. Universal restructured so that multi-day park-to-park tickets now include Epic Universe on every day of the ticket, not just one. Previously you got a single Epic day and that was it. A one-day Epic Universe ticket starts around $139, and prices move with the season, so check the date you want before you budget.
Early Park Admission is the real perk. Universal hotel guests get in up to an hour before regular opening, and that includes Epic Universe. An hour at Epic before the gates open is worth more than Express Pass money for a lot of families. The catch is that Disney resort guests get their own early entry, and you cannot be in two hotels at once, so doing both parks well usually means picking which resort you stay at and accepting you lose the other’s head start.
Use Child Swap, and ask for it at the ride entrance before you get in line, not after.
Build in a pool day between the two resorts. Disney days and Universal days are different kinds of tired, and stacking them back to back is how a vacation turns into a forced march.
The part nobody puts in the guides
The Epic Universe buses do not leave from anywhere near the parks. They board at the bus bays out in the CityWalk parking garages, which on a map looks like nothing and in real life is a hike.
We found that out coming off a full day at Islands of Adventure. Everybody was done. The kind of done where you are quietly doing math about whether anyone actually needs dinner. And then you walk out of Islands of Adventure, through CityWalk, past every restaurant with people sitting down at them, and keep going, out to the garages.
It is not far enough to be a disaster. It is far enough that it is the part of that day I actually remember. Plan for it the way you would plan for a ride, because that is what it costs you.
The short answer
Go measure your kids. Right now, against a doorframe.
If the smallest one clears 40 inches, this is a real conversation about days and money. If they do not, you already have your answer, and it is the kind of answer that saves you about a thousand dollars and one very long afternoon.
Epic Universe will still be there when they grow. That is the nice thing about two inches. They come on their own.
