In March of last year the average price of a dozen large eggs in the United States hit $6.227. That was an all-time high and it produced about four weeks of egg coverage on every news program in the country. I remember standing in front of a mostly empty case at Giant Eagle and taking a photo of it, for no reason I could articulate, other than that it felt like the sort of thing you take a photo of.
It is a year later. The case is full. As of the January reading, the most recent the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published, the average dozen is $2.577.
Eggs are worth going back to specifically because they are the rare grocery item where the entire cycle happened in public and fast enough to actually watch. Most food price moves are slow and boring and you only notice them in aggregate. This one had a cause, a peak, and a recovery, all inside about eighteen months.
What actually happened
Highly pathogenic avian influenza. Between October 2024 and February 2025 roughly 44 million table egg layers were culled, according to Congressional Research Service reporting. You cannot replace a laying hen quickly. A pullet takes something like four to five months to start producing, so a supply shock in the fall lands on shelves through the following spring no matter what anybody does about it.
Retail followed wholesale up with a lag, peaked in March 2025, and then fell for eleven straight months.
SMOPPER INSIGHTS
Average US retail price, one dozen grade A large eggs
Source: BLS average price series APU0000708111, US city average. Every point is a published monthly figure. October 2025 was not collected during the appropriations lapse, so that segment is dashed rather than drawn.
That gap in the middle of the recovery is not a rendering mistake. There is no October 2025 figure because the data was not collected during the lapse in appropriations that fall. I left it as a hole rather than drawing a line through it, which is the same reason a lot of Smopper's own categories look thinner than they could.
The numbers behind the shape
A few of these are worth having in your head, because the run-up gets remembered as a single event and it was really five distinct months.
| Month | Avg. per dozen | Change |
|---|---|---|
| October 2024 | $3.37 | — |
| December 2024 | $4.15 | +23% |
| February 2025 | $5.90 | +42% |
| March 2025 | $6.23 | +6% |
| May 2025 | $4.55 | −27% |
| September 2025 | $3.49 | −23% |
| January 2026 | $2.58 | −26% |
The January figure is the lowest in this series by a wide margin, below where the whole thing started and below the $3.37 of October 2024. Rebuilt flocks overshoot. Every hen brought in to replace a culled one keeps laying after the shortage ends.
The question I could not answer
Here is where I have to be straight with you about what this site can and cannot do yet.
I wanted to put our own Pittsburgh shelf prices next to that national line. Three questions in particular seemed worth asking: did the local peak arrive later than the national one, did the spread between stores widen while eggs were scarce, and did cage-free move differently from conventional.
I could not answer any of them, because we did not start keeping dated price snapshots until November 2025. By then the peak was eight months gone. What we hold for the shortage itself is nothing at all.
That is a genuinely annoying thing to discover in the middle of writing, and it is worth saying out loud rather than quietly writing around. A current price answers "what does this cost." Only a history answers "is this normal," and almost every useful question about groceries turns out to be the second kind. We were building the first thing for a long time before I understood we needed the second.
So the local version of this post gets written next year, with real numbers, or it does not get written. A gap beats a guess, and this is what that costs when the gap is mine.
What I take from the national picture
A price spike with a biological cause has a shape you can predict
Hens take months to lay. That is not market sentiment, it is a fact about birds, and it meant the recovery was predictable in form if not in date. You cannot stockpile eggs, so there was no clever play available. But the general lesson holds: when a price move has a known supply cause and a known recovery period, waiting is usually the right call, and the people who did the worst last spring were the ones who treated it as permanent.
The average hid an enormous amount
A national number that says $6.23 was, in any given week, a range from something considerably lower to something quite a bit worse, depending on which store you walked into. Scarcity is what turns a near-commodity into a comparison-shopping item. When there is plenty of something, every store prices it within a few cents and there is nothing to compare.
That is the part I would most like to have measured locally, and it is exactly the part we missed.
It is not over
Avian influenza has not been solved. It has been survived. A rebuilt flock is a larger target than a depleted one, and detections have continued. I would not be surprised to write this post again.
The boring conclusion
I did not do anything clever last spring. I bought fewer eggs for about two months, baked less, and waited, and it worked out. "Wait it out" is not much of an insight and I am not going to dress it up as one.
What did change is that we now write the prices down. Every week, dated, whether or not anything interesting is happening, which is the only way you ever get to find out that something interesting was happening. The broader food inflation picture works the same way. No individual week ever looks like anything.
If you want to know what eggs cost near you right now rather than what they averaged nationally last month, that part we can do.