Why are eggs so expensive?
Honest answer: right now, they aren't. A dozen large eggs averages $2.19 right now — about normal for the last five years. But eggs spike harder than any other staple every few years, and if you're reading this during one, the reasons below are almost certainly what's happening.
The short answer: it's almost always bird flu
Eggs don't get expensive the way most groceries do — a slow creep of costs. They spike, and the trigger is nearly always the same: avian influenza reaches commercial laying farms. When a single barn tests positive, the whole flock is lost, and the big operations house millions of hens. Lose a few of those in a season and a meaningful slice of the country's egg supply disappears in weeks.
The recovery is what makes spikes last. A replacement hen takes about five months from chick to first egg, so even after an outbreak stops, supply stays short for most of a year. Prices climb fast on the way up and take months to come back down — that shape repeats in every spike on the record.
What happened in 2025
The worst egg spike on record. Bird flu burned through laying flocks in late 2024 and kept going into the new year, and by March 2025 the national average hit $6.23 a dozen — nearly three times what eggs cost a year and a half earlier. Wholesale prices broke first, in the spring; shelf prices followed over the summer and fall, the way they usually do. By December 2025 a dozen was back under $3, and it has kept easing since.
Today's number: $2.19 a dozen (July 2026 average) — about normal for the last five years.
Why eggs and not, say, bread?
Eggs behave more like a raw commodity than a packaged grocery. There's no brand to absorb the shock, no recipe to reformulate, and nothing to substitute — an egg is an egg. They don't keep long, so nobody can warehouse their way through a shortage. And people keep buying them almost no matter the price, which means a small supply gap moves the price a lot. Most groceries have shock absorbers; eggs are wired straight to the market.
The wholesale clue
In the wholesale market, a dozen large white eggs went for about $1.09 this week — down 20% from the week before.
Wholesale is where stores buy before you do, and it moves first. When wholesale prices swing, shelf prices have usually followed within a few weeks — that has been the pattern through every recent egg cycle. That's why this site shows both numbers: the shelf average and the wholesale price together tell you where things stood and which direction the register has been catching up toward. (USDA's report for the week of August 9–15, 2026 put the national warehouse price at $1.09 a dozen.)
Are stores price-gouging?
The honest version: the gap between what stores pay and what they charge does widen during a spike — shelf prices climb slower than wholesale on the way up and come down slower on the way back. Some of that is stores smoothing out a wild market for shoppers; some of it is stores being in no hurry. Both things were visibly true in 2023 and again in 2025. What the numbers don't support is the idea that gouging causes the spikes: the farm-level price moves first and hardest every time.
Cage-free laws are the quiet second reason
California, Massachusetts, and a growing list of states require cage-free housing for eggs sold there. Cage-free costs more to produce in the best of times, and during an outbreak those states' supply pools are smaller — which is why the same carton can cost dollars more on one coast than the other. It shows up clearly in the regional table.
Common questions
Will egg prices go back up?
Nobody can honestly tell you what prices will do, and this site doesn't guess. What the record shows: every egg spike since 1980 has come from a supply shock — almost always bird flu — and each one has ended as flocks were rebuilt, usually within a year. The numbers on this site refresh weekly, so the price at the top of the homepage is the current answer.
Why are eggs still expensive at my store?
The $2.19 figure is a national average of what shoppers actually paid (July 2026). Individual stores land all over that average — and states with hen-housing laws, like California and Massachusetts, sit structurally higher because cage-free eggs cost more to produce. The regional pages break out where prices sit around the country.
Do egg farmers make more money during a spike?
Partly, and briefly. USDA's weekly report tracks what farms themselves were paid, and that number spikes hardest and falls fastest — but the farms at the center of an outbreak lose their flocks entirely, which is the grim math that starts the spike in the first place.
When do these numbers update?
The retail numbers update once a month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its average price survey (mid-month, covering the month before). The wholesale egg price updates every week from USDA's market report, so it moves first when something is happening.