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A healthy laying hen produces somewhere between 150 and 320 eggs a year — but the honest answer is "it depends," and the difference between breeds, ages and seasons is huge.
The breed you pick sets the ceiling. Production hybrids and the classic dual-purpose laying breeds far out-produce ornamental and broody breeds. These are typical full-season figures for a healthy bird in her first laying year:
| Breed type | Eggs / year | Eggs / week |
|---|---|---|
| Hybrid layers (ISA Brown, Golden Comet) | 280–320 | 5–6 |
| Rhode Island Red, Australorp, Leghorn | 250–300 | 5–6 |
| Sussex, Plymouth Rock, Wyandotte | 180–240 | 3–5 |
| Orpington, Brahma, Cochin | 150–200 | 3–4 |
| Silkies & bantams | 80–120 | 2–3 |
So three or four laying hens of a good breed will keep a small family in eggs, while the same number of Silkies might give you a carton a week.
Hens start laying around 18–22 weeks. Their first year is their peak — and it's downhill from there, gently. Expect roughly a 10–20% drop each year, so a third-year hen may lay only half of what she did as a pullet. Most backyard hens lay reliably for three to four years and dribble out a few eggs for several years after that.
Laying is driven by daylight. Hens need about 14 hours of light to ovulate on schedule, so production naturally falls in autumn and winter and surges again in spring. On top of that, most hens take an annual molt in late summer or autumn and stop laying entirely for a few weeks while they regrow feathers. A flock that gives you a dozen eggs a day in June can easily drop to two or three in December — and that's completely normal.
Averages are a starting point, but your real number depends on your exact birds, their age, your daylight, feed quality and stress levels. The only way to know what's normal — and to catch a problem early when laying suddenly drops — is to actually count. A week of logging tells you your true eggs-per-bird rate, and a season of logging shows you your flock's natural rhythm.
Track your flock's egg count free →I built ChickenLog as a free, private, offline log for exactly this — tap in your daily egg count and it shows your weekly, monthly and per-bird totals so you always know what your hens really produce.