What backyard chickens actually cost

There's a particular kind of blog post that works out the cost of backyard eggs, counts the feed, and triumphantly announces it comes to 12p an egg.

It's not lying, exactly. It's just quietly forgotten the coop, the fencing, the bedding, the months when nobody lays a thing, and the £90 you spent at the vet on a hen who died anyway.

So here are our actual numbers. UK prices, small flock, nothing left out. Costs vary a lot by region and by how much you're willing to build yourself, so treat these as honest ballparks rather than a quote.

Setting up

Item	Realistic range	Notes
Coop (4–6 birds)	£200–600	The £120 flat-pack ones from garden centres rarely last three winters
Run / fencing	£150–500	Weldmesh, posts, and a skirt dug in
Automatic pop-hole door	£80–150	Optional. Not really optional.
Feeder and drinker	£30–60	Buy bigger than you think
The birds	£15–30 each	Point-of-lay hybrids at the lower end; pure breeds more
Odds and ends	£40–80	Bedding, grit, a bucket, a scrubbing brush that becomes The Chicken Brush

Realistic setup total: £500–1,200 for a proper job with four to six birds.

You can do it far cheaper. Secondhand coops appear constantly on local selling pages, and pallets are free if you're handy. But be careful with a used coop — red mite live in timber cracks for months and a bargain coop can come with an infestation that's genuinely miserable to clear. Scorch it with a blowtorch or treat it thoroughly before it goes anywhere near your birds.

Running costs

For four hens:

• Layers pellets: a hen eats roughly 120–130g a day. That's about 3.5kg a week for four birds, so a 20kg bag (£12–18) lasts around six weeks. Call it £10–13 a month.
• Bedding: shavings or chopped straw, £8–15 a month depending on weather. Wet winters cost more because you get through it faster.
• Grit and oyster shell: a bag lasts most of a year. £1–2 a month amortised.
• Treats and extras: mealworms, corn, apple cider vinegar, poultry tonic. £3–8 a month, entirely dependent on how soft you are. We are very soft.

Around £25–35 a month for four hens, or roughly £300–400 a year.

The costs nobody budgets for

This is the section the cheerful posts skip.

Vet bills. Not every vet sees poultry, and the ones who do aren't cheap. A consultation is typically £40–70 before anything is actually done. Egg binding, sour crop, a prolapse, a respiratory infection — any of these can turn into £100+ quite quickly. Pet insurance for chickens exists but is unusual; most people self-insure, which is a polite way of saying they hope.

It's worth deciding in advance, calmly, what your ceiling is for a bird worth £20. There's no right answer, but working it out at 9pm with a poorly hen in a cat carrier is worse.

Red mite treatment. Almost everyone gets them eventually. Diatomaceous earth, a proper coop treatment, possibly replacing perches. £20–60 and a lost weekend.

Worming. A licensed flubendazole product every few months. £15–25 a time.

Holiday cover. Either you have a lovely neighbour, or you're paying a pet sitter £10–20 a visit.

The garden. Genuinely a cost. Chickens will kill a lawn and excavate borders. Netting, edging, or replacement plants — budget something, or accept the garden is theirs now.

Housing orders. When avian influenza restrictions require birds to be kept under cover, you may need to roof a run at short notice. Tarpaulin and battens, £50–150, usually purchased in a panic in the rain.

So what does an egg cost?

Let's be generous and assume four good hybrid hens averaging 250 eggs a year each — that's 1,000 eggs, which is an optimistic but achievable first year.

At £350 a year running costs, that's 35p an egg. Before the setup.

Amortise an £800 setup over five years — £160 a year — and you're at 51p an egg.

Now be realistic. Year two the laying drops. Year three it drops further. Add a vet bill, a mite treatment, a fox-proofing upgrade. Over a hen's actual lifetime, 60–80p an egg is closer to the truth for a small flock, against maybe 35–45p for good free range eggs in a supermarket.

Where the money actually goes

The thing that surprises people is that feed isn't the main cost. Feed is the predictable, cheap, boring bit. The money goes on infrastructure and on the unexpected — and the single biggest variable is how good your initial setup was.

A cheap coop that rots, a run that a fox gets into, fencing that doesn't hold — those are the things that turn an affordable hobby into an expensive one. Spending more at the start genuinely costs less over five years, which is annoying advice when you're standing in the shop, but true.

How to actually keep it down

• Buy the good coop once. Or build one. The mid-range flat-pack coops are the worst value in poultry keeping.
• Buy feed in 20kg sacks from an agricultural merchant, not 5kg boxes from a pet shop. Roughly half the price per kilo.
• Store feed in metal bins. Rats will chew through plastic, and feeding the local rat population is expensive and brings its own problems.
• Use a treadle feeder if you have wild birds or rodents about. Stops a startling amount of waste.
• Deep litter or wood chip in the run rather than replacing bedding constantly.
• Don't over-treat. Corn and mealworms are the poultry equivalent of crisps. They cost money and reduce laying if they displace proper feed. Under 10% of the diet.
• Sell or swap surplus eggs. A box at the gate at £2 covers a surprising amount of feed. Note that selling eggs brings some labelling and registration considerations once you're beyond casual gate sales — worth a look at the rules if you get serious.

Is it worth it?

Not financially. Let's be straightforward about that: if the goal is cheap eggs, this is not the way, and anyone telling you otherwise is doing the sums with their thumb on the scale.

But that's a bit like costing a garden by the price of the vegetables. What you actually get is birds with names and opinions, breakfast that tastes better than anything you can buy, kitchen scraps that stop being waste, and something to go and look at when the day's been rubbish.

Roughly the price of a streaming subscription and a coffee a week, for a garden full of small dinosaurs who are pleased to see you. We think that's a bargain — but it's a bargain, not a saving, and it's worth knowing which one you're buying.