Economist Writing Every Day

Everyone is talking about the price of eggs. Even the President. That’s despite the fact eggs, on average, constitute about 0.1% of consumer spending (according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2023). Even so, economists always get excited when people talk about prices.

On prices at the current moment, I wrote a blog post for the Cato Institute looking at the relevant supply and demand factors, and trying to explain why wholesale egg prices are falling so quickly. When will these falling wholesale prices translate into lower retail prices? The NY Times asked this question, and I tried to answer it for them (answer: perhaps in a few weeks).

But let’s step back from the current moment and take a longer-term perspective on egg prices. This chart shows the long-run real price of eggs, measured in terms of how much time an average worker would need to work to afford 1 dozen eggs:

I’ve put the data on a logarithmic y-axis because the decline is so huge over time. In 1890, it took about 100 minutes of labor to buy one dozen eggs. Back then, a dozen eggs only cost about 20 cents. Sound great! Until you realize that average wages were only about 13 cents per hour.

100 minutes of labor for a dozen eggs was still true almost 30 years later, but then in the 1920s the real price of eggs (compared with wages) started to fall. And it keeps falling, pretty consistently. There was some slowdown in the decline around 1990, but still by the time we reach 2019 it had fallen to 3.6 minutes of work — the lowest on record, and a 96% decrease since 1890. Wow!

Since 2019 we’ve seen some backsliding. The data presented here are annual averages, except for 2025, which is an average of January and February (both for prices and wages). I’m pretty confident the full 2025 data won’t look as dramatic (we had a few months of high eggs prices in 2022 and 2023 too), but even at the current prices of eggs, we’ve backslid all the way to about 1974. It takes about 10.6 minutes of labor at the average wage to purchase 1 dozen eggs. For most Americans, this means eggs right now are the most expensive they have ever been in their adult lifetime — hence why it’s being talked about so much — but even so, it’s a massive increase in affordability compared to 100 years ago.

Notes on data: average egg prices are from various BLS reports, up to 1970 collected by the Historical Statistics of the US, for the 1970s from The Value of a Dollar, and from 1980 forward directly from the BLS website. Wages are my combining of the production workers series from Measuring Worth up to the 1930s (when they start to add in the value of benefits), the manufacturing production workers series up to the 1960s, and the all-industry production/non-supervisory series up to the present.