What can my child actually ride?
Height, not tickets, is what decides most family days in the parks. Pick your child's height and see exactly which of the 106 Disney and 43 Universal Orlando attractions we track are open to them — and which are not.
The short answer
Forty inches is the threshold the Orlando parks are quietly built around — it opens more attractions in one step than any other gate. Below 38 inches a child rides almost everything gentle and almost nothing famous. At 48 inches every Disney attraction we track is open, while Universal still has four coasters above that line. Heights are checked at the queue entrance with shoes on, so measure in the shoes your child will wear.
The first height that opens a genuine headliner rather than a kiddie ride.
The single most important height in Orlando — the one that opens the most rides at once.
A narrow gate, but it opens one of the best rides at each resort.
The height that opens the three Disney rides adults fly in for.
Every Disney attraction we track is now open. Universal still has four gates above you.
Why we built this from the ride data, not a chart
Every list on these pages is generated from the same height field we use on our ride-by-ride verdicts, so the numbers cannot drift apart from each other. What we deliberately do not do is invent a price: Disney prices Lightning Lane by date and demand, Universal sells Express Pass as a day product, and any per-ride dollar figure you see quoted flatly is a guess. The useful question is which queues are long enough to be worth skipping — answered ride by ride in the Lightning Lane worth-it guide and the Express Pass worth-it guide.
Height is one of three things that decide a family day. The second is when you go, which the crowd calendar covers month by month. The third is whether you want to spend the day making these calls yourself — which is what we do. Planning Paris instead? Disneyland Paris posts its limits in centimetres and sells Premier Access per ride.
Mixed-height family? That is the hard version.
A 38-inch child and a 48-inch child want different parks on different days. A real guide builds one plan that works for both instead of splitting your group at every height marker — from $75/hour on your first trip.