Q&A on Egg Prices
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President Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on lowering egg prices, which increased significantly toward the end of the term of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
Where do prices stand now? What caused them to spike last year?
Here, we answer those and other questions about the cost of the popular food item.
Are egg prices going up or down?That depends on which prices you’re talking about.
In remarks on March 16, Trump said that when he began his second term in January, the price of “eggs were through the roof,” but now “are down 35% over a short period of time.” Vice President JD Vance also talked about declining prices on March 14, saying, “Egg prices are lower than they were when we took office.”
What neither the president nor vice president made clear is that they were referring to wholesale prices, which is how much retailers pay to farmers and other egg producers to procure eggs to sell in their stores.
In its March 14 Egg Markets Review, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that average national wholesale prices for graded, loose, white large shell eggs declined to $4.15 per dozen – down roughly 39% from $6.85 per dozen on March 7. By March 21, average prices for those eggs, which had been as high as $8.17 on March 3, had dropped further to $3.27, the USDA said.
Before Trump took office, average wholesale prices rose from $1.07 as of Jan. 5, 2024, to $5.87 as of Jan. 17, 2025.
But during the campaign, Trump seemed to be focused on lowering prices for consumers — not retailers. So far, it’s not clear whether prices have gone down much for grocery shoppers. We won’t have March data on retail prices until April.
In February, retail prices paid by consumers were still increasing, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last month, the nationwide average price for a dozen grade A white eggs was about $5.90 – up more than 19% from $4.95 in January, the previous average price record in the U.S.
The USDA’s March 21 report on egg markets said that, just in time for the Easter holiday, “consumers are slowly beginning to see downward price adjustments.” Although, “it remains to be seen if the recent price drops will be sufficiently reflected in store shelves to encourage price-weary consumers to not limit their holiday celebrations,” the report said.
Some economists have said that retailers may not lower egg prices for consumers until current store inventories run out, or until retailers can recoup some of their lost profits.
Generally, consumer prices for eggs have been trending up since the fall of 2023. Current wholesale prices are also still higher than they have been on average in past years.
What caused egg prices to increase?Many economists say the primary reason is the highly pathogenic avian influenza – caused by the H5N1 virus – that has been spreading among poultry, dairy cows and wild animals in the U.S. since January 2022. What is now the largest bird flu outbreak since 2015 has caused an egg shortage, as tens of millions of egg-producing hens have had to be killed to prevent further spread of the virus.
As of March 20, more than 168 million birds had been affected in total, according to USDA data. Over 30 million birds from commercial egg layer flocks have been lost in 2025 alone.
The diminished egg supply, coupled with consistently high consumer demand, led to price increases. There was a similar spike in prices in 2022 and early 2023, during the first months of the outbreak, when average retail egg prices reached a then-high of $4.82 per dozen.
Inflation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic played a role as well.
“Inflation is another, if less dramatic, factor driving up egg prices,” Bernt Nelson, an economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation lobby, wrote in a March 11 analysis. “While inflation has slowed over the last couple of years, it’s important to remember inflation is a measure of growth. Slowing inflation doesn’t mean prices are going down, it means they are getting expensive more slowly.”
On top of making eggs more expensive in grocery stores, inflation “also raises the cost of everything it takes to produce eggs on the farm and get them on grocery store shelves,” Nelson said. That includes the cost of replacing chickens that are bred to produce eggs, he said.
Is price gouging happening?Farm Action and Food & Water Watch are two advocacy organizations that have alleged that corporations are making huge profits by intentionally keeping supply low and prices high.
In a March 7 post, Farm Action said: “While avian flu has been cited as the primary driver of skyrocketing egg prices, its actual impact on production has been minimal. Instead, dominant egg producers—particularly Cal-Maine Foods—have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power. The slow recovery in flock size, despite historically high prices, further suggests coordinated efforts to restrict supply and sustain inflated prices.”
Photo by artrolopzimages / stock.Adobe.comThe Wall Street Journal and others reported in early March that the Department of Justice opened an investigation to determine if egg prices were being manipulated by large producers.
But Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, said that there is a much simpler explanation for why prices have remained high: supply and demand.
“[Y]ou don’t need shadowy conspiracies of egg producers to understand the dynamics of egg-flation in the United States,” he wrote in a March 14 commentary piece for the Cato Institute. “Those same theories were trotted out in 2022–23 during the last big increase in egg prices, with many on the political left blaming a conspiracy of egg producers and corporate greed for high egg prices. That argument was wrong then, as we know, because egg prices quickly fell from almost $5 per dozen in January 2023 down to $2 per dozen in summer 2023. This change wasn’t because egg producers suddenly got less greedy: It’s because the supply shock of the major avian flu outbreaks ended.”
Horpedahl continued, “All you need to explain the price fluctuations of eggs is good old supply and demand. Avian flu is the biggest challenge recently, with around 68 million egg-laying chickens being affected in the past year, with 44 million of those in just the prior three months (December 2024 to February 2025). The USDA also tells us that there are 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the US, so over 11 percent of the total supply has been reduced in a very short time.”
And, he said, “because so many consumers are willing to keep buying eggs as the price rises, the price has to rise a lot in response to an 11 percent reduction in supply and still have the market clear—which happens when enough buyers have decided they don’t need the good anymore.”
What is the Trump administration doing to address high prices?On Feb. 26, the USDA announced a $1 billion, “five-pronged strategy” focusing on biosecurity to minimize outbreaks, relief for farmers, vaccine research and regulation reductions.
The department said that up to $500 million would be used to expand wildlife security measures, including free biosecurity audits to egg-producing facilities to protect flocks from virus transmission from wild birds. The plan also calls for up to $400 million to be used to help farmers speed up the chicken repopulation process, and as much as $100 million could go to exploring potential vaccines and therapeutics that may protect chickens from future outbreaks.
In addition, the USDA said that it would explore temporarily importing egg products to increase the domestic supply. The department already has reached import agreements with Turkey and South Korea.
Is the Trump administration responsible for lower wholesale prices?A White House post on March 21 mentioned several “resounding wins” that were attributed to Trump’s “economic agenda.” The first item highlighted on the list: “Wholesale egg prices dropped for the third straight week — down more than 50% since President Trump took office.”
Before that, on March 12, the president said from the Oval Office, “We have a great secretary of agriculture, and we did a lot of things that got the cost of eggs down very substantially.”
But it’s not clear that the decrease can be credited to the administration’s policies.
The USDA said in its March 14 report that wholesale prices had gone down because “no significant outbreaks” of the bird flu were reported in March, “rapidly improving” the supply situation. The report also said that high retail prices had weakened consumer demand for eggs, which also helped with store inventories.
And when the USDA’s plan was announced last month, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that the administration’s strategy was not an immediate fix.
“This five-point strategy won’t erase the problem overnight, but we’re confident that it will restore stability to the egg market over the next three to six months,” she wrote in a Feb. 26 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.
Furthermore, the Des Moines Register reported that, in a March 20 call with reporters, Rollins acknowledged that prices for consumers could remain high for some time.
“While calling lower wholesale prices a move ‘in the right direction,’ Rollins said grocery store prices could, in fact, continue climbing, given increased demand ahead of the upcoming Easter holiday,” the newspaper said about her remarks. “In addition, she noted that the spring migration of wild birds is imminent, bringing the threat of increased bird flu outbreaks, the main reason for the egg-price runup.”
“While [wholesale] prices are exponentially down, and we’re really, really encouraged by that, there’s always a possibility that prices could tick back up,” Rollins said, according to the Register.
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