Egg prices inch downward

Wholesale egg prices have declined in recent weeks, but it might be several weeks before the impacts are felt for consumers at the grocery store. A dozen eggs sold wholesale ranges from $3.75 to $5.11 nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Egg Markets Overview.

That’s an average nine-cent drop from the previous reporting period last month. Retail prices remain higher, however. The average carton of eggs in the U.S. is $5.90.

Consumers may have to wait before seeing lower prices at the grocery store, said Jada Thompson, associate professor and poultry economist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

“In the same way that just because the barrel price of oil goes down does not mean that gas prices immediately go down, there’s a delay here,” Thompson said. “Retailers get to choose their own price, and they take a lot of losses when prices are exceptionally high. They may be saying, ‘I’ve lost money over here, so I’m going to let what I have in stock go out at the price it currently is before I lower the price, to compensate for that earlier loss.’”

Retailers often use eggs as a “loss leader,” meaning the product is sold at a price below its market cost to stimulate the sales of more expensive goods. She said that it serves as an incentive to bring that retail price back down.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, is still impacting chicken flocks and typically higher demand at Easter could lead to price fluctuation.

“Eggs are a basic product that everybody puts in their basket, so I think there will be a pretty quick response to that,” Thompson said. “The only caveats to that are more cases of HPAI and the holiday demand. You’re going to have a little bit of extra demand for the holiday season, so you’re not necessarily going to see the prices go up, but you may see fewer eggs on the shelf. That might drive a little of the competition for those wholesale market eggs, which is eventually going to bump that price a little.”

Transportation and production input costs, including feed, can also impact the price of eggs, Thompson said.

“The cartons, the cleaners, all the things that are going into the inputs, we don’t necessarily manufacture in the United States, so with any disruption in trade there will likely be changes in cost of good, and some of those are going to affect the price of eggs or the price of inputs for those eggs,” Thomspon said.

Feed prices are also calculated in the cost of producing eggs, and Thompson said those change with corn and soybean prices. Though the price of eggs is coming down, Thompson said the extent of the decline would be market-based.

“Some of the markets have been recovering,” she said. “They’ve already had new birds coming online and laying eggs again.”

“Some markets are still hit pretty hard,” Thompson said. “I don’t think we’re going to see $1.99 eggs anytime soon, but I think that everybody is working really hard to get back to that.”

The HPAI outbreak in 2024 had a significant impact on the number of egg layers in the country. In 2024, 38 million layers were affected by the bird flu. An additional 30 million layers were affected in January and February 2025, impacting the total number of eggs.

“Prior to the disease outbreak, we were producing about 8 billion eggs on a monthly basis,” Thompson said. “For February of 2025, we produced about 6.6 billion. From a scalability perspective, that’s why when people were talking about the high egg prices, it’s because we just don’t have the eggs.”

Thompson said that though the number of layers is still low, she is seeing those numbers coming back up.

“We see really high recovery and replenishment rates in eggs in incubators,” Thompson said. “It looks like the industry is doing an awful lot to try to bump up the number of birds as quickly as possible so that those egg numbers recover as quickly as possible.”