How HPAI moves egg prices

HPAI moves egg prices by taking hens out of production faster than the industry can put them back. Highly pathogenic avian influenza is a bird disease, and when APHIS confirms it at a commercial egg farm, the response is to depopulate the entire flock to stop the spread. A single layer complex can hold several million hens, so one confirmed detection can erase a meaningful slice of national supply in a day.

The flock, and how big the hole is

The US table-egg flock runs a bit over 300 million hens, so the size of any given loss is best read as a share of that. The chart above tracks the egg-layer birds APHIS has confirmed lost to HPAI over time. Laying hens have taken the brunt of the outbreak that began in early 2022: USDA figures put table-egg layers at roughly three-quarters of all birds lost while making up under 4 percent of the country's poultry, because layer barns are large and concentrated. The flock stood near 406 million hens at its 2019 high. By early 2025 it had fallen to its lowest in years after a hard winter of detections.

Why the price jumps

Supply drops the moment a flock is depopulated, but demand does not. Households and bakeries buy about the same number of eggs the week after a detection as the week before, so a sudden gap between steady demand and a smaller supply forces the wholesale price up. A run of large detections in a short window, the pattern of the worst stretches, compounds the effect, because each one removes another block of hens while the first barns still sit empty.

Why the recovery is slow

Rebuilding is the slow half, and it is why prices come down long after they went up. Once a barn is depopulated it has to be cleaned, disinfected and left empty until environmental tests come back negative, a matter of weeks before a bird can return. Then the farm has to source chicks and raise them, and a pullet takes roughly 18 to 20 weeks to reach laying age, per industry and extension sources. Add the approvals and the staged restocking and the full path from an empty barn back to full production commonly runs six months or more, sometimes past a year. Supply leaves in a day and comes back over seasons. That is the whole shape of an HPAI price move.

Read it against the price

To see the effect, line the detection history up against the benchmark. When a cluster of layer losses on the chart above lands just before a run-up in the national large white price, that is the mechanism working. The lag between a detection and the price peak, and the longer lag back down, is the flock-rebuilding timeline showing up in cents per dozen.

The Scramble attributes every detection to USDA APHIS as confirmed and reports the affected-bird counts APHIS publishes. It does not forecast detections or prices.