Wholesale egg prices have plummeted. Will shoppers see the savings?

Egg prices are very different this year from last year – at least for now.

In January and February 2025, grocery shoppers were scrambling to find eggs on bare shelves and paying skyrocketing prices. Restaurant-goers were seeing egg surcharges as the industry dealt with the worst year of a bird flu outbreak.

Though the threat of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), or bird flu, is still high, the egg industry now has an oversupply, and wholesale egg prices in early January were at record lows, an egg farmer and others in the industry told USA TODAY. Egg farmers are now selling their product for less than it costs to produce them.

"There's never been a better time to buy eggs," said Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board.

What has happened to egg prices in the past year?

What has happened to the industry and egg prices is classic supply and demand. Last year, with a significant part of the U.S. egg supply affected by the bird flu during a time of seasonal demand, shoppers grew concerned and started overbuying eggs, said Jada Thompson, associate professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas. And prices soared.

But over the past seven months, wholesale prices have dropped nearly 90% and reached historic lows in early January, Metz said. The wholesale price of a dozen large eggs hit a low of 36 cents a dozen, according to the USDA Egg Markets Overview on Jan. 9.

The price of eggs on the wholesale market has increased since 4.5 million hens were lost to the bird flu in January and February, Matt Sutton-Vermeulen, principal in the agriculture and food practice of Kearney, told USA TODAY.

The Feb. 6 USDA Egg Markets Overview report listed a dozen large eggs at a wholesale price of $1.25. The price has dropped even further since and the wholesale price was 52 cents a dozen, according to the Feb. 20 report. That's a 58% percent drop in the wholesale price in two weeks. President Donald Trump in his State of the Union address on Feb. 24 said the price of eggs was down 60%.

Are prices at the grocery store down?

Prices at the grocery store have come down, but not as dramatically as wholesale prices, Sutton-Vermeulen said.

Retailers often work through their contracts with suppliers and are on a quarterly or half-year basis, he told USA TODAY. Additionally, retailers will sometimes delay price increases or decreases when markets spike or soften, he said.

Comparing the latest retail egg price information available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index (CPI), the average cost for a dozen Grade A eggs in the United States was $2.58 in January 2026, a 48% drop compared with $4.95 in January 2025. The highest CPI price for eggs was in March 2025, when it was $6.23.

Prices remained high in April and May and began to drop in June 2025.

According to USA TODAY's Grocery Tracker based on data from Datasembly, egg prices have been on a roller coaster since mid-2022, hitting peaks in the winters of 2023 and 2025, when they rose over 150% above pre-pandemic prices in January. Since then, prices have cooled: They were down 42% in the third week of February compared with the same week last year nationwide but remained about 43% higher than February 2020.

Some Walmart shoppers could have already seen egg prices drop at their local stores, according to USA TODAY's shopping cart tracker, powered by Bright Data, a data-scraping company. It tracks real-time prices collected weekly from Walmart’s online marketplace for at least one location in each state. The data shows that egg prices in multiple states have fallen since late October, when USA TODAY began tracking them.

For example, egg prices in Newton, New Jersey, dropped from $6.54 a dozen to $2.96 on Feb. 20 at Walmart stores. In Chicago, prices fell from $3.46 to $2.96.

Is the bird flu still a threat to the U.S. egg supply?

The bird flu outbreak strain, H5N1, which started among poultry flocks and wild birds in Europe in the fall of 2020 before moving to the United States, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, has become the nation's largest such outbreak.

Between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, the U.S. egg industry lost 50 million laying hens to bird flu, Metz said.

It can take nine months to more than a year for an egg farm to recover from a bird flu detection and return to full production, Metz said.

But "we're not in the same position this year," Metz told USA TODAY, saying bird flu is still present but has not been as significant.

Will prices rise again?

No one can predict what prices are going to do because the bird flu is unpredictable, Thompson said.

"Next month, we could have millions of birds out of the system, and we could see this whole problem flip-flop again," she said.

Additionally, egg prices being lower than the cost of production is great for consumers, Thompson said, but some farms may not survive, which could then affect retail prices. "Nobody is signing up to lose money," Thompson told USA TODAY, referring to egg farmers.

Egg farmer's flock was the first hit with bird flu in U.S.

The egg farming industry has always gone through periods of high and low prices, but nothing to the magnitude of the past five years with bird flu, said Mike Puglisi, whose family is in its third generation running Puglisi Egg Farms, with locations in New Jersey and Delaware.

Last year in particular was hard when the industry lost so many birds, he told USA TODAY, creating a "disaster" and a huge shortage, which made prices "go crazy."

February 2022 was personally even worse, when his farm became the first U.S. commercial egg farm to be hit by the latest strain of bird flu and lost its entire flock, he said.

Now there are more eggs than people need and prices have dropped below the cost of production, Puglisi said.

No dyeing of Easter potatoes this year

Last year, egg prices were so high that consumers looked to alternatives, such as dyeing potatoes for Easter instead of eggs.

"We're coming into Easter. It's our Super Bowl," Metz said. "There should be no one worried about dyeing potatoes this year. ... We're dyeing eggs and dye an extra dozen."

This story has been updated with new information.

Contributing: Data journalists Suhail Bhat and Dian Zhang

Betty Lin-Fisher is a consumer reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on X, Facebook or Instagram @blinfisher and @blinfisher.bsky.social on Bluesky. Sign up for our free The Daily Money newsletter, which breaks down complex consumer and financial news. Subscribe here.