How Many Chickens Do You Need for Your Family’s Eggs?
Start from the eggs you eat each week, divide by what a hen lays, and round up. Here is the math and where the numbers come from.
By the Egg Cost Check team · Published 2026-10-19 · Updated 2026-10-19
The formula
Hens needed = eggs your household eats per week ÷ eggs per hen per week
Round up to the next whole hen. A dozen is 12 eggs, so a household that eats 2 dozen a week eats 24.
A worked table (using 5 eggs per hen per week)
Five eggs a week is the default in our calculator. It is an example, not a promise. Change it to match your birds.
| Eggs you eat | Calculation | Hens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 dozen a week (12) | 12 ÷ 5 = 2.4 | 3 |
| 2 dozen a week (24) | 24 ÷ 5 = 4.8 | 5 |
| 3 dozen a week (36) | 36 ÷ 5 = 7.2 | 8 |
What a hen actually lays
University of New Hampshire Extension: Producing Your Own Eggs lists yearly production by breed: 250 to 300 eggs for White Leghorns, 250 to 280 for Rhode Island Reds, 200 to 280 for Barred Rocks, Black Australorps and Buff Orpingtons, 180 to 200 for Ameraucanas and Easter Eggers, and 100 to 160 for standard Cochins. It also says a 10-hen flock should lay about nine eggs a day once every hen is laying.
Spread over 52 weeks, those yearly figures work out to roughly 2 to 6 eggs per hen per week. That is our arithmetic. Real flocks lay less in winter and when hens molt, so read why hens stop laying before you size a flock.
Bigger is not always cheaper
- More hens spread some setup costs over more eggs.
- Feed, bedding and space grow with the flock. See coop and run space per chicken.
- Many places cap the number of hens. Check your rules first with the pre-purchase checklist.
If your rules allow it, one extra hen is a reasonable cushion for slow weeks. That is our suggestion, not a standard.
Put your flock size into the calculator →
Sources
More guides
- When Do Chickens Start Laying Eggs? What Year One Costs Before That
- Why Chickens Stop Laying: Winter Light, Molting and Other Causes
- How Much Coop and Run Space Does Each Chicken Need?
- How to Protect Your Chickens from Predators
How we write: we link the sources we use, we label examples as examples and we do not claim hands-on results we have not had. See our method. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.