Methodology

How the data is collected

Everything on this site comes off two public federal sources, pulled on a fixed schedule. Prices and inventory come from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Egg Market News reporting API: the daily National Shell Egg Index, the weekly Combined Regional report and the New York and California reports, the weekly Shell Egg Inventory, and the weekly Grocery Store Egg Feature Activity. The bird-flu tracker comes from the USDA APHIS confirmed-detections record. There is no scraping of prose and no estimation; every figure comes straight off a structured report row, and the region, size, color, form, production method and delivery basis on every row are mapped to a fixed vocabulary. A description that does not map is logged and skipped, never guessed, because one cage-free price read as a conventional price is a wrong number to a buyer.

Each pull covers a trailing window, not just the newest day, and a missed or partial run backfills on the next one. Nothing is silently skipped or left blank.

Cents per dozen, and the range

Every wholesale price is in cents per dozen, exactly as USDA publishes it. The national benchmark is a single 5-day weighted average. The regional reports publish a low-high range and an average; we store the whole range and quote it as a range in words, never flattened to the midpoint. A midpoint is kept only so the charts and the week-over-week math have a single value to track; it is never quoted as a price. Retail feature prices are per carton in dollars, a different unit, and are labeled that way.

Loose versus cartoned

Loose eggs move on flats in a 30-dozen case, the form the wholesale market quotes and the form the national benchmark is. Cartoned eggs are packed in retail cartons and cost more for the packing. The benchmark and the regional wholesale pages are loose; the retail feature figures are cartoned. We never compare a loose price to a cartoned one as if they were the same market.

The cage-free premium

The cage-free premium is the difference between the cage-free price and the conventional (caged) price for the same size and color, computed live from the two USDA national large white loose benchmarks. It is never a stored number. Caged is treated as the conventional base against which every premium is measured. USDA also reports free-range, pasture-raised and organic as further steps up; those ride in the data but the headline premium is cage-free over conventional, the one buyers plan around.

Why prices carry no five-year normal

USDA rebuilt its shell-egg price reporting in early 2025, so the negotiated price series only go back to then. There is not yet enough history for an honest five-year normal on prices, so the price pages carry no five-year line and no "versus normal" tag; week-over-week and year-over-year carry the story. As the series age, the five-year read will appear on its own. Inventory is different: it has been reported for years, so inventory pages do carry a real five-year band.

Direction: what counts as tight, what counts as hot

The colored tags read from a buyer's chair. On the inventory pages, below the five-year normal is the alarming direction: it means a tight, firming market, so the home page ranks the tightest regions first. On the price pages, above normal would be the hot direction, but because those series are too young for a five-year normal we do not tag them yet. Inventory, with real history, is the market's supply gauge and the one the board is built on.

Inventory versus the four-week average

Alongside the five-year band, each inventory page states where the latest reading sits against its own trailing four-week average, the shorter-run read of whether stocks are building or drawing. Both are plain comparisons of stored weekly readings, no smoothing.

The HPAI overlay

The bird-flu tracker uses USDA APHIS confirmed detections in commercial poultry, filtered to the egg sector, the table-egg layer flocks that produce the eggs you buy, plus the pullets and breeders upstream of them. Each detection is dated by its confirmation date, never the day we ingested it, and carries the affected-bird count APHIS publishes, which APHIS rounds to the nearest tenth of a million. We report the confirmed record and never forecast the next detection or model a recovery date.

How comparisons are computed

Week-over-week, month-over-month and year-over-year are each the change between the latest value and the value that many days back on the same series, two readings compared directly, no smoothing. Where a series has enough history, the five-year comparison is the current value against the median of that same calendar week across the prior years. Median, not average, so one freak year does not skew the baseline. Where a series is too young, the comparison simply does not appear.

What we do not compute

We do not forecast anything: not the next price, not supply, not the next detection. Where a public number does not exist, the site says so rather than substituting an estimate. Charts and statistics on this site are free to republish with visible attribution and a link back.

For the plain-English version of how to read a page once the numbers are in front of you, see how to read this.