Resumo. ABSTRACT The leisure is a constitutional right for Brazilians citizens. People with disability form a group that may encounter architectural and attitudinal barriers to access leisure, therefor is relevant to study the understanding of this theme. The present research investigated how physical education undergraduates in public institutions of the state of São Paulo understand leisure for people with disability. A qualitative design was used. A sample of 322 undergraduate students attending senior year, from 9 campi of universities in state of São Paulo, answered a semi-structured questionnaire. Data analysis was performed with Iramuteq software, using Reinert method to analyze the corpus clusters. Results showed that the students understanding of leisure for people with disability overlaps with the conventional definitions used in scientific literature in Brazilian context. As a conclusion, they understand: (1) leisure is the same for people with and without disability; (2) leisure is a possibility for people with disability; (3) leisure is about pleasure; (4) activities that may be understood as leisure; (5) spaces need to be adapted to received people with disability properly.