The Whiplash of American Egg Prices

Did imported eggs in 2025 affect the prices paid to American farmers in 2026?

Analysis, words, and visuals by Will Koeppen

American egg producers are on a financial rollercoaster. Since 2022, the H5N1 variant of the bird flu has led to the death of more than 207 million poultry, with the vast majority of those killed because of outbreaks in close-quartered egg farms. Bird flu has upended normally-predictable egg markets, and the price paid to farmers has both peaked and plunged as domestic supply has wobbled for this American staple.

Supply and Demand

Chicken eggs have unique properties that have centered them in human life for thousands of years. Nutritious and high in proteins, eggs can bind other ingredients together or trap air to make bread rise. Yolks have lecithin, which gives them the ability to disperse oil into water (emulsification), and whites can act as a foaming agent. Eggs are perishable, but they come in their own protective casing that helps them last weeks before going bad.

As a staple food, the demand for eggs follows stable, annual trends. "In general, eggs are not a thing that people talk about. They're a pretty inelastic good. We buy them and we consume them at a pretty steady rate, even during periods of financial distress," said Dr. Jada Thompson, an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas.

Bird flu directly attacks the supply side of the equation by killing egg-laying hens. A single hen produces around 280 eggs per year, and an outbreak on a typical commercial farm can lead to the deaths of millions of hens. Each outbreak decreases the available eggs in the market until that hen can be replaced, a process that can take up to 30 weeks. Meanwhile, restaurants, bakeries, processed food factories, and grocery stores compete for the remaining supply.

The widespread outbreaks of bird flu that occurred over the 2024-2025 winter killed 46 million hens over the course of just 12 weeks. By March 3, 2025, wholesale egg prices reached a record high of $8.17 per dozen.

Eggs as a Litmus Test

As the price of eggs skyrocketed, the political capital to be gained by bringing it back to earth was enormous.

After his inauguration, President Trump appointed Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and tasked her with the job. One month later, on February 26, she announced a five-point plan to reduce egg prices. The plan included expanding a Biden-era program to help farmers assess the biosecurity of their farms, larger indemnity payments to farmers whose chickens were depopulated because of bird flu, a vaguely-worded measure about reducing regulations on the industry, and money that would go towards development of poultry vaccines. Lastly, the plan said that the USDA would "explore options for temporarily increasing egg imports and decreasing exports."

In truth, the USDA must have already secured import agreements and done significant legwork, because by the end of February, just two days after Rollins' announcement, the U.S. had imported 47 million fresh eggs from Turkey and Mexico and the equivalent of 91 million dried eggs, primarily from Lithuania.

Risk of Non-participation

In 2024, the U.S. imported 74 million table eggs. In 2025, the USDA increased imports of those eggs by over 1,000%, increased imports of egg products by 115%, and decreased the export of domestic eggs by 20%. The annual combined swing of imports and exports meant that the market gained the equivalent of about 1.5 billion additional eggs over the previous year.

Industry-friendly media, as well as independent experts like Dr. Thompson, are quick to point out that while the absolute numbers of imported eggs and related products sound large, they're only a fraction of the U.S. egg market. Calculated annually, U.S. egg farms produced about 90 billion table eggs in 2025, meaning that increased imports, plus the eggs kept at home instead of exported, accounted for about 1.6% of the total U.S. egg market.

On the other hand, during high-import months, the imports more than made up for egg losses. For example, in July 2025, U.S. farms produced 7.6 billion eggs, 140 million eggs fewer than in July 2024. But the agreements encouraged by the USDA brought in the equivalent of 203 million eggs, about 2.6% of the entire market share.

New or increased imports of eggs and egg products came from a slew of countries. The largest imports came from Lithuania (which sent almost 2,500 metric tons of dried eggs), Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Canada. Other imports came from Honduras, Pakistan, China, and Azerbaijan. Perhaps most surprisingly, the U.S. imported fresh, graded table eggs from Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. banned all Russian imports of oil, natural gas, seafood, alcohol, and many of its metals, but in 2025 it accepted 3.6 million eggs.

It's not obvious why countries became eager to export their eggs to the U.S. in 2025, but it's possible they were prompted to make deals for political reasons.

On re-election, the second Trump administration veered away from decades of conservative philosophy that favored free trade agreements to announce Executive Order 14257. The so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs assigned blanket rates by country rather than according to specific goods. Although the order would eventually be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, during 2025 it opened an intense period of chaos in world trade. As the tariffs were announced, changed, and changed again — there would be 23 Executive Orders related to tariffs — foreign countries scrambled to commit to selling hundreds of millions of eggs to the U.S. Perhaps those countries just wanted to sell eggs, or perhaps they were trying to use egg deals to appeal to the administration and eke out a more favorable long-term blanket rate.

Cue the Promotional Tour

Egg prices quickly fell. In fact, both the retail and wholesale prices dropped so quickly from February to March 2025 that none of the points in Secretary Rollins' plan, including the imports that had just begun, could have been responsible. That didn't stop President Trump from claiming the credit.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump mentioned the high price of eggs at 16 events and interviews. In his second term as president, he has mentioned the low price of eggs at 96 events, and on average he tells a story about eggs once every five days.

In speeches, he likes to begin with "Remember eggs?" In most versions, someone comes to him on his first day in office "screaming about eggs." Despite his campaign rhetoric, he feigns ignorance: "What's going on with eggs? Tell me, I didn't hear about it." The price of eggs during the Biden administration often changes, and it could be "double," "triple," "quadruple," or "five times" above an unstated baseline. He particularly loves a story about refusing to order plastic eggs for an Easter egg hunt in April 2025, deciding instead to just lower the price of real eggs.

President Trump has mentioned some version of the egg price story in front of senators, governors, foreign ambassadors, Department of Justice staff, and the Dodgers. He told it in bilateral meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Giorgia Meloni (Italy), Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Abu Dhabi), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), and with leaders of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal. It was mentioned at celebrations for Women's History Month and Ramadan, at political rallies, at new tariff announcements, in news interviews, and at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Board meeting after he declared himself chair. It came out at talks discussing automobile mileage standards, whole milk in schools, coal, EPA rules on refrigerants, and at the announcement renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. He brought it up as he met with first responders who helped during the Guadalupe River floods in Kerr County, Texas, that killed 119 people on July 4, 2025.

Into the Gutter

When wholesale prices dropped below $2.50 per dozen in August 2025, imports were scaled back. When the price per dozen fell to a little over $1.00 in the fall, imports stopped almost completely.

According to the Egg Industry Center at Iowa State University, the cost for a commercial farmer to produce one dozen eggs is 78 cents. Roughly half of that goes to feed, which takes a mix of corn, soybeans, wheat, and other grains. On December 26, 2025, the USDA reported that the wholesale price of eggs fell below that break-even point. Starting in April and through the beginning of July, it's been hovering around 25 cents per dozen, with a low of just 16 cents on May 7.

As of data from May 2026, American consumers are still paying an average of $2.25 for a dozen of the supermarket's cheapest, non-organic eggs from caged chickens. That's because large, commercial egg producers often have six-month or one-year contracts, which insulate both egg farmers and consumers from low prices. Small, non-contract farmers, however, are in an untenable spot in a market with too much supply, and agricultural economists are starting to warn about a possible "wave of consolidation," when small egg producers get eaten up by large ones.

Cause and Effect

When telling his egg price story, President Trump never mentions how his administration lowered the price of eggs.

The egg imports proposed, negotiated, and implemented by the USDA are correlated with a decrease in prices paid to American egg farmers. But did they contribute to dropping the wholesale prices below the cost of production?

Without looking at the data herself, Dr. Thompson had doubts, given the scale of the imports. Instead, she thought the low price was primarily because U.S. egg producers had overcompensated from the year before, expecting high case counts of bird flu that didn't materialize in 2026.

With bird flu in something of a remission, it's clear that the market is now awash in egg-laying hens. But the current, fundamental problem for the domestic market is an oversupply of eggs, and the USDA's push for foreign imports of eggs directly increased that supply.

For most of our country's history, the federal government has avoided using foreign imports to control what American consumers pay for domestically-grown food, instead preferring to use tax breaks, crop incentives, insurance programs, or other subsidies to direct agriculture. Bird flu, political promises, and even personal favoritism have changed that.

On February 6, 2026, President Trump used a presidential proclamation to announce an initiative to lower the cost of hamburgers for Americans — by increasing imports of beef from Argentina.