Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
72 comments
·October 23, 2025jnmandal
chrisco255
The other thing about chickens is they are pretty easy to care for. If you feed them grain and provide them decent shelter and clean their cage out every week or two, they will be perfectly happy.
pixl97
Of all issues predators are the biggest risk I've seen in small raising operations. Especially if they wander open range or have a sizable fenced in area. Raccoons can be the worst as they are good at getting in places they shouldn't be, but Hawks, foxes, coyotes, and ferel pets cause problems too.
walkabout
> Let me just add I don't think backyard eggs are cheaper, even at the height of price spike, because when externalities like feed and enclosure are calculated the resulting product won't have the economies of scale
The math checks out if:
1) You build your coop and enclosure basically out of junk or otherwise for near-free (good luck with the, ah, “spouse test” on that);
2) You lean heavily on kitchen waste for food;
3) You place no value on the time spent on anything chicken-related;
4) You butcher and eat each chicken after ~3 years when their rate of laying drops off (you stop wasting food and space on an unproductive layer, and gain “free” chicken meat);
5) You raise more than you eat and sell the excess (ten chickens aren’t much more effort than four chickens, and the extra may cover feed and replacement costs for the flock);
So yeah it doesn’t really work out, just buy $5-$8/dozen backyard chicken eggs from someone else who’s bad at math or has different priorities (loves the smell of chicken shit, maybe?), you’ll come out ahead. Or get them from the grocery store if you don’t care much about the chickens’ diet and conditions.
IAmBroom
To be fair, March 2025 was impacted by bird flu, so the prices were destined to be anomolous.
One of my huskies got out and did $70-80 worth of damage to my neighbor's flock: two laying hens.
aesh2Xa1
Not to be that guy, but feed/enclosure are direct costs.
Externalities are costs/benefits to someone uninvolved with the chicken/egg transaction (noise or free insect control affecting your neighbor are negative and positive cases).
IAmBroom
Another externality: in the city, chickens attract children. :D
elthran
Your phrasing of the last sentence caught my interest. Is the other reason fresh chicken meat, or is there another benefit to keeping them that I can't think of?
everdrive
Chickens are incredible composters. Put in your raked leaves, almost 100% of your food waste, paper towels if they don't have chemicals in them, grass clippings, etc. They'll be clawed through and pooped on and turned into fresh soil. If you have the space for the chickens, they can be worth it for this reason alone. They're less work than bagging up your leaves and you'll reduce the food volume in your trash to almost zero.
joncrane
This. How do you harvest/refresh the compost though? Just move the cage over? Do you kind of suspend the cage a bit and let the little stuff fall through?
Jeremy1026
My neighbor keeps chickens as therapy animals, and is allergic to eggs.
kevstev
Laying chickens are very different from broiler (eating) chickens. You can eat laying chickens but the meat is much stringier. You can stew them though, coq au vin is a French dish more or less made for these types, even though its the norm these days to use regular eating chickens when making it.
nandomrumber
Some other reasons to keep chicken: insect control, weed control, fertiliser, mental health, good for kids.
macintux
My cousin lives in Kentucky, and apparently her chickens are hugely beneficial with tick control, which is a big deal.
IAmBroom
So, the eggs roughly follow the CPI, except during spikes in avian bird flu? 2015, 2022, and 2025 were peak years for bird flu in avian populations.
Since 2022 and 2025 are close together, and the latter very recent (the flu outbreak peaked in early 2025, not today)... it's not even suprising to see the non-spike prices of 2023-2024 and late 2025 elevated. Chickens are fungible, but the manufacturing method still has a latency to it.
mikaeluman
Out of all thousands of products, goods and services you will find plenty that track the official number "fairly well" out of of pure chance.
I fail to see any significance of this one chart.
cjs_ac
The retail price of eggs was a significant talking point in the campaign for the last US presidential election (which I'd forgotten until I saw this post).
chrisco255
That's because they slaughtered a huge amount of chickens due to bird flu. As you can see from the chart, the egg prices have plummeted as chicken populations have recovered.
candiddevmike
That chart still shows the prices being higher than they were a year ago. People voted for cheaper eggs, right?
PedroBatista
The only significance I can see is in the amplitude of the fluctuations. Which I intuitively attribute to massive concentration of both production sites and ownership of businesses.
gruez
> Which I intuitively attribute to massive concentration of both production sites and ownership of businesses.
This doesn't pass the sniff tests. There are plenty of other goods with equal or greater concentration that don't see wild swings like this, cars and CPUs, for instance.
PedroBatista
Not every product is the same.
You can't "manufacture" an egg like you do with a car. Entire egg "production" sites need to be shutdown and millions of chickens killed because of some strain of bird flu for example. And you can't just order 5 million egg laying chickens to substitute the old production with a lead time of a few weeks.
walkabout
Not quite that fast, but not too far off. Certainly a lot faster than building a new factory. Laying chickens start producing in a matter of weeks. Time for breeding to scale is also needed (but very fast), and they’re not producing at max rate for somewhat longer than that, but still, in the scheme of things egg production has got to be among the most-responsive products in the market.
gruez
Right, but the OP blames it on "concentration", whereas you're just describing factors that make a commodity volatile. The global crude market isn't anywhere near as concentrated as the US egg market, but it's also quite volatile.
pkilgore
Are there big problems with Car flu in your part of the world?
I mean, my CPU had definitely run a virus or two but nothing causing long term damage.
jimlawruk
I have been haphazardly tracking my grocery prices at Aldi since 2022. My lowest price was $1.12 per dozen in Nov 2023, my highest was $5.97 in Feb 2025. Last recorded price in September was $2.71.
chrisco255
This chart seems off, for some reason. It shows the average price for a dozen eggs as hitting $1.20 in 2019. I don't remember ever paying that little in my adult life for eggs, and I've lived in small towns during that time frame too.
Also this should be noted: Large white, Grade A chicken eggs, sold in a carton of a dozen. Includes organic, non-organic, cage free, free range, and traditional.
Egg options in grocery stores today are way more diverse than they were when I was a kid in the 90s. Organic eggs were rare. None were cage free. Today's options include soy-free, cage free, free range, etc. I pay a premium for soy free, free range eggs. This wasn't even an option in 1997 or 2005 or most of the years listed here.
bluedino
Before Covid it wasn't uncommon to see eggs under a dollar per dozen.
mjd
I don't remember being able to buy eggs for $1.50 a dozen.
walkabout
Never bought eggs before covid, or never shopped the sale ‘fridges at the grocery store and/or regular-priced eggs at Costco? Under $1 wasn’t uncommon.
IAmBroom
National averages are not locally valid.
mc32
Looks like actual prices are trending back to the index. There was a big spike induced by the culling of millions of birds a couple of years back.
elzbardico
Yes. It is a shame both sides explored this politically in the most superficial manner. Those cullings (there was also a more recent one), for sanitary reasons, should have sparked a higher level debate on food security viz novel epidemic threats.
But, politics in the US are completely dominated by lawyers, everything is about rhetorics and scoring talking points. But problems like that require an engineering mindset.
acdha
> It is a shame both sides explored this politically in the most superficial manner.
It was one side. The liberals were trying to have the conversation you mentioned, with extensive discussion about why this wasn’t as severe in other countries due to differences in farming practices or talking about vaccination, but the Republican strategists saw an opportunity in just hammering the idea that Biden had some kind of magic egg price lever in his office. Saying “both sides” is supporting them by reinforcing their framing even though it’s ahistorical.
_heimdall
166 million chickens were culled earlier this year [1]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry...
okokwhatever
[flagged]
_heimdall
They don't process and sell culled birds. At large scale when culling due to disease, they generally turn off the ventilation system and suffocate the birds en masse.
tomhow
You can't post snarky dismissals like this on Hacker News. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines when commenting here.
gruez
"Culling" is different than "slaughter for meat"
hyperpape
I appreciate this graph as a (very partial) rejoinder to the inflation truthers.
I could believe that there is some modest measurement error in how we calculate inflation, but, picking relatively arbitrary dates that I happen to remember, the idea that 2000-2025 inflation was double the reported numbers doesn't pass the sniff test.
programjames
What dates? 2000 August–2025 August gives 3.18%/year for the consumer index and 7.12%/year for egg prices. Even if you assume egg prices will come down to $3/dozen, it's still 6.24%/year.
somenameforme
I don't have a horse in this race outside of general skepticism of official numbers (though inflation is particularly difficult to fake since you can literally just buy/assess the basket of goods the figures represent yourself), but I don't think this is the rejoinder you're looking for. Eggs went from 0.975 to 3.587, a 3.68x increase. CPI went from 1.69 to 3.23, a 1.9x increase. So the price of eggs increased 93% more than nominal inflation.
acdha
Wouldn’t that make eggs the outlier? For CPI to be wrong you’d have to show similar rises in lots of other things.
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2OEH8eoCRo0
$6.20 for a dozen eggs still sounds like a good deal. Think about the amount of work to get those onto a refrigerated shelf in the supermarket. It's amazing.
CaptainOfCoit
> refrigerated shelf in the supermarket
Wow, today I learned that in some countries, the supermarkets keep their eggs in the refrigerator! Apparently there is a protective coat on eggs that sometimes gets washed away, and when it is, you need to store the egg in a cold environment otherwise bacteria gets in. In other places, eggs aren't washed (that much at least) so the protective coat is still there, so we store our eggs on normal room temperature shelves.
microtonal
Yeah, I wondered for a long time why fridges have egg holders, since I had never seen eggs in a fridge in a supermarket (yeah, I’m not in the US).
They are probably washed, but only minimally - sometimes there is still a small feather or some dirt on an egg.
kbcool
That much is the key.
They're still washed, otherwise they would have all kinds of crap on them (literally, chickens only have one hole), they just aren't subjected to chemicals and scrubbing etc.
Having very low salmonella rates in the flock makes it really unnecessary
CaptainOfCoit
> otherwise they would have all kinds of crap on them
The eggs I buy in my supermarket don't have literally crap on them, but it isn't uncommon that they have bit of dirt or hay/grass on them, and those are bought from a mainstream supermarket chain. I do realize they obviously do a quick cleaning pass regardless, just wanted to clarify that many eggs aren't pristine when bought :)
rsynnott
This was a big talking point back when TTIP was on the agenda; eggs were kind of the model case of how completely incompatible EU and US regulations would act as a trade barrier even in the absence of tariffs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-am...
2OEH8eoCRo0
No comment about refrigerated eggs goes unanswered.
CaptainOfCoit
One of us has to be the lucky 1 in 10,000, today it was my day :)
rob
No it isn't. A dozen can fly by for a single person or a small family. You'll probably need at least two dozen a week. Hell, a lot of recipes ask for 2-3. So now you're looking at almost $50 a month just for eggs (2dozen/week @6.20.)
That might be easy for you when you're working at Microsoft and making $500,000 a year, but that's a significant amount of money for a lot of people in the United States. And eggs aren't some fancy item. They're eggs.
"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost?"
gruez
>And eggs aren't some fancy item. They're eggs.
>"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost?"
It's funny you bring up that up, because bananas are tropical fruits shipped from thousands of miles away, but somehow cost less than domestic fruits like apples. You might not think bananas are "fancy" either, but it's a miracle it's as cheap as they are.
Jeremy1026
> A dozen can fly by for a single person or a small family.
A dozen eggs lasts months in my house (family of 4). We just aren't egg people. The kids will ask for scrambled eggs occasionally, but it's pretty rare. The only time we use a lot of eggs is when we make Christmas cookies, and an 18-count pack typically does the job there. My point being, it's all relative.
walkabout
Depends on your cooking. Lots of baking, or lots of certain dishes (pastas, stir fries, that call for or benefit from eggs)? You’ll tear through eggs even if nobody eats them scrambled or over-easy for breakfast.
One angel food cake or batch of soufflé and you’ll use a bunch right there. Just a glaze on some meat pasties might burn two or three, and they’re barely even an ingredient in that case. Hell, family of five, one scrambled egg breakfast a week can knock out an entire dozen if you use zero other eggs that week for anything.
The things are little chemical miracles somewhere between useful and indispensable for all kinds of stuff in the kitchen, or good as a (usually…) dirt-cheap source of protein, vitamins, and flavor that can be added to lots of dishes or eaten on their own, making them remarkably versatile and easy to use.
bluedino
I work from home so I eat 3-4 each morning.
2OEH8eoCRo0
You're missing my point that it's amazing they're as cheap as they are considering the logistics involved. Bananas are also amazingly cheap considering where they ship from.
thisislife2
Hmmm ... 12 eggs in India is currently only around $1 (it used to be around 1/2 that price a year or 2 ago) ... Those packed and sold by billion dollar companies, retail from around US $2 though ...
null
screenoridesagb
Eggs and milk used to be staples people “needed” they were just few alternatives in the food market. Now they are basically luxury goods with staples being things like chicken nuggets and colas.
I’m not saying it’s good or bad either way, but if the price of eggs were increased 1000% it wouldn’t effect people’s quality of life as much as a 1% increase in the cost of education or healthcare.
stOneskull
how can cola be a staple? it's disgusting. imagine before giving your kid a glass of water, you add 10 teaspoons of sugar to it.. and a bit of coffee
6LLvveMx2koXfwn
not to be facetious but image getting a glass of water, adding ten teaspoons of sugar to it and a bit of coffee and thinking that it is . . . 'cola'.
walkabout
What’s crazy is how many people routinely drink the equivalent of two or more bags of skittles with their meals, between enormous to-go drink sizes and frequent, free refills when dining in.
Like… ew, friggin’ gross.
IAmBroom
OK, OK... make that sugar HFCS, and also add artificial coloring. And carbonate it.
As someone who keeps backyard chickens and recently got a new flock, I will say anecdotally this spike was observed even in livestock.
In March 2025, I tried to order baby chicks to replace some of my aging flock. Not only was every hatchery sold out, but going in person to farm stores meant waiting in lines on the days shipments were received and dealing with rationing (3 chicks per person, etc).
I opted to order chicks for the fall instead of doing a normal spring brooding and luckily the weather cooperated, but as is normal I ordered some extra chicks as padding. The extras I have now been able to sell locally at a premium, covering my entire cost.
Let me just add I don't think backyard eggs are cheaper, even at the height of price spike, because when externalities like feed and enclosure are calculated the resulting product won't have the economies of scale. But I think many people decided they wanted a steady supply after eggs became hard to come by. I personally keep chickens for reasons besides eggs but I am still happy that more folks are keeping chickens.