Best Time to Ride Star Tours at Disneyland

By Laura T. · Adult Disney

Published November 10, 2026

Here’s the spicy part: Star Tours barely has a line. Across seven Disneyland park days logged November 4–10, 2026, the median posted standby wait for Star Tours – The Adventures Continue topped out at 15 minutes. That was the worst hour of the day. The best hours sat at 5 minutes.

So the real question isn’t “when should I ride Star Tours?” It’s “why would I ever spend a Lightning Lane on it?” Hold that thought.

What the hourly numbers actually looked like

These are SupaPark’s own logs of the posted standby wait — the number on the sign out front, not a stopwatch on your actual time in queue — across seven Disneyland Park days, November 4 through November 10, 2026. SupaPark only started logging Disneyland Resort in November 2026, so treat this as an early read on one week, not a season-long pattern and not a forecast.

Median posted wait by hour, Pacific time: 5 minutes at 8 AM and 9 AM. It ticks to 10 at 10 AM, then peaks at 15 minutes from 11 AM through 1 PM. Back to 10 at 2 and 3 PM. Then it bounces between 5 and 10 for the entire evening — 5 at 4 PM, 10 at 5 PM, 5 at 6 PM, 10 at 7 PM, and a flat 5 minutes at 8, 9 and 10 PM.

Lowest hour: 8 AM, at 5 minutes. Highest hour: the late-morning block, at 15 minutes. The spread between the best hour and the worst hour of the entire day is ten minutes. Ten.

The move: ride it when you’re already walking past

Most “best time to ride” advice tells you to rope-drop the thing. Here, that’s a waste of your most valuable hour. At park open you can be standing at Space Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure, or over in Galaxy’s Edge at Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run — rides whose waits actually balloon as the day goes on. Burning 8 AM on a ride that posts 5 minutes at 9 PM is how people end up with a 70-minute afternoon line for something else.

The smart play is to treat Star Tours as a filler — a ride you slot in when you’re already in Tomorrowland for something else, or when you need a sit-down, air-conditioned, 5-minute break in the middle of the afternoon heat. The ride itself runs about five minutes, so you can genuinely do it start to finish in roughly fifteen minutes including the queue at most hours.

If you want the absolute path of least resistance: late evening. From 8 PM to close in the logged week, it sat at a posted 5 minutes. That’s effectively a walk-on, and it’s a great landing spot for a tired party that’s done with the big-ticket stuff.

Planning around this? Open Disneyland in SupaPark.

Don’t spend your Lightning Lane here

Star Tours is part of Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disneyland, as of November 2026. On paper that’s a perk. In practice it’s a trap for first-timers.

Remember how Multi Pass works at Disneyland Resort — it’s nothing like the Walt Disney World version. You buy it as a ticket add-on or upgrade before you arrive, or same-day in the Disneyland app, and you make your first selection only after you’ve entered the park that day. From there it’s one at a time: your next pick unlocks after you redeem the current one, or two hours after you booked it. That two-hour clock is the whole game. Every selection you make is an opportunity cost against the ride you didn’t pick.

So if you spend a selection on a ride that posted 5 to 15 minutes all week, you’ve traded two hours of Multi Pass capacity to skip a line that barely exists. Spend those selections on the rides where standby genuinely hurts — the mountains, Indiana Jones Adventure, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway — and walk into Star Tours on standby whenever you feel like it.

One honest caveat: Multi Pass attractions vary by date, and so do waits. If you arrive and Star Tours is posting 45 minutes on a holiday-level crowd day, the math changes. Check the sign and the Disneyland app rather than assuming one November week applies to your trip. But on a normal day? Save the selection.

Height, motion sickness, and who should actually skip it

The minimum height is 40 inches (102 cm). That puts it in the same band as Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Disneyland, which makes it a clean group ride for families whose smallest rider just cleared 40 — nobody gets left out at the gate.

What will leave someone out is the ride system. Star Tours is a 3-D motion simulator, and it is not a gentle one. The cabin pitches and jolts in sync with the screen, and the mismatch between what your eyes see and what your inner ear feels is exactly the combination that makes people queasy. Plenty of regular Disneyland guests who happily ride coasters skip this one specifically because simulators don’t agree with them. If anyone in your party gets carsick, gets motion sick in VR, or struggles with a screen-based ride, this is the one to sit out — and that’s a legitimate call, not a wimp-out.

There’s no single rider line here, so don’t plan around one. Rider Switch is available at most Disneyland Resort attractions, which is your tool if an adult needs to stay back with a child who’s under height or sitting it out: the party splits, a Cast Member scans the waiting party’s admission, and up to two of them ride afterward without standing in standby again.

The reason it stays worth doing

Star Tours shuffles its destinations, so the version you get isn’t the version the family ahead of you got — there are well over 200 possible storyline combinations, and Disney has continued adding new scenes to the Disneyland version, including material tied to Ahsoka Tano. That’s the genuine case for riding it more than once on a trip: it’s cheap in time, and the odds are decent you’ll see a sequence you haven’t.

Which loops back to the strategy. A ride with a 5-minute posted wait and randomized content is a ride you can hit twice in a day for less total time than one mid-afternoon standby queue at a headliner. That’s the actual insider use of Star Tours — not a destination, but the most efficient repeat in Tomorrowland.

The one thing to remember

Star Tours’ posted wait barely moves, so stop optimizing for it. Ride it in the evening or whenever you’re passing through Tomorrowland, keep your Lightning Lane Multi Pass selections for the rides that actually build real lines, and check the posted sign on the day rather than trusting any one week of numbers — including this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best time to ride Star Tours at Disneyland?

In SupaPark’s logs of seven Disneyland Park days from November 4–10, 2026, the posted standby wait was lowest at 8 AM and again from 8 PM to close, both at a median of 5 minutes. Late evening is the better choice, since rope-drop hours are more valuable spent on rides whose waits grow through the day.

What time is Star Tours busiest at Disneyland?

Late morning into early afternoon — the median posted wait peaked at 15 minutes from 11 AM through 1 PM Pacific in that logged week. Even at its worst it was only about ten minutes above its best hour.

Is Star Tours worth a Lightning Lane at Disneyland?

Usually not. It is included in Lightning Lane Multi Pass as of November 2026, but because Disneyland lets you hold only one selection at a time, spending it on a ride that posts 5 to 15 minutes costs you a pick you could have used on a longer line.

How tall do you have to be to ride Star Tours at Disneyland?

The minimum height is 40 inches (102 cm). Rider Switch is available at most Disneyland Resort attractions if someone in your party is under height or sitting it out.

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