US egg production

This is the supply side beneath the price: how many hens are laying and how many eggs they produce, from USDA's monthly Chickens and Eggs report (NASS). The flock figure is the number of table-egg layers on hand at the start of the month; production is the table eggs those hens laid during the month; the lay rate is eggs per 100 layers, a measure of how hard the flock is working. Bird flu is the main reason the flock swings: when a commercial layer flock is confirmed infected it is depopulated, which removes hens from this count, and rebuilding takes months. This page reports the counts NASS publishes and links the HPAI tracker for the detections behind the moves, without attributing any specific change here to a specific cause.

How many eggs the US produces in a year. Over the twelve months through August 2026, US table-egg production came to 92.87 billion. That is table eggs only, the ones sold in cartons and broken for egg products; it excludes hatching eggs, which are a separate NASS series and never enter the food supply. The figure moves with the size of the flock and with how hard that flock is working, which is what the lay rate in the table above measures, so a year can lose output either because there are fewer hens or because the hens on hand are younger and not yet at peak lay.

Where the flock stands. The laying flock is 5.4% larger than it was a year ago. A flock this size does not change quickly in either direction: a pullet takes roughly five months from hatch to first egg, so a producer restocking after a loss is committing to a decision whose output arrives half a year later. That lag is why the flock line on the chart above falls in steps and recovers in slopes, and why a supply shock shows up in price well before it shows up as a smaller number here.

The flock since 2022. On Feb 1, 2022, a week before APHIS confirmed the first commercial flock detection of the bird-flu outbreak that began that year (Feb 8, 2022), the US had 327.1 million hens in table-egg flocks. The count fell as low as 291.9 million hens (Mar 1, 2025) and has added 26.9 million hens since: at 318.7 million hens on Sep 1, 2026, the flock is the largest since December 2023 and 2.6% below its February 2022 level. How bird flu affects egg prices covers why a lost flock takes months to rebuild.

Egg production by state. Iowa and Ohio each kept about 44 million hens in commercial laying flocks in August 2026, and with Indiana and Pennsylvania the four states held 49% of all hens in commercial flocks (USDA NASS). Over the past year Ohio added the most hens (7.8 million, up 22%), and Wisconsin lost the most (2.6 million, down 36%). Egg production is a concentrated industry housed in a small number of very large complexes rather than spread evenly across farm country, which is why a single confirmed infection can remove a noticeable share of national supply. NASS publishes hens for more states than it publishes egg output for: it withholds a state's table-egg figure to avoid disclosing data for individual operations, which is why Ohio, Michigan, California, New York, Washington and Colorado appear in the hen table but not the egg table, where their eggs sit inside Other states. Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas are withheld from both.

How a bird-flu detection becomes a production dip. When highly pathogenic avian influenza is confirmed in a commercial table-egg flock, the entire flock is depopulated, and the birds leave this count in the month the depopulation happens. The site then has to be cleaned, disinfected and left empty before it can be repopulated, and the replacement pullets need those months to reach lay. So a single detection produces a sharp one-month drop in the flock line, a shallower drop in production because the remaining hens keep laying, and a recovery that takes two or three quarters rather than weeks. The HPAI tracker carries the detections themselves, and why are egg prices high right now covers how a supply loss reaches the shelf.