Why Your Chickens Stopped Laying: Work Through This List

A flock that was laying well and suddenly is not sets off more worry than almost anything else in backyard keeping. Most of the time nothing is wrong: chickens are seasonal animals and the pause is built in. But a few causes do need action, and the order you check them in matters.

Work through it in this order

1. They may not have stopped at all

Before anything else, rule this out. A free-ranging hen who has found somewhere better than the nest box will use it consistently and quietly, and people spend weeks diagnosing a laying problem that is actually a hiding problem.

Shut the flock in the coop and run for three full days. If eggs appear, go and find the nest — under a shed, in long grass, behind the woodpile.

2. The moult

The most common genuine answer in autumn, and the one that alarms people most because the birds look terrible.

Once a year, usually as days shorten, a hen drops and regrows her feathers. Feathers are roughly 85% protein, and a hen cannot build them and eggs at the same time — so laying stops almost completely for 6 to 12 weeks.

There is nothing to fix. You can help by raising dietary protein during the moult, which shortens it, and by handling the birds less: new pin feathers have a live blood supply and are genuinely sore.

3. Daylight

Laying is triggered by light falling on the hen’s eye, not by temperature. Below roughly 14 hours of daylight the reproductive cycle winds down — which is why production falls through autumn and returns in late winter, weeks before the weather improves.

You can override it with a timer lamp bringing total light to 14–16 hours. It works. But the winter rest lets the reproductive tract recover, and flocks pushed through every winter tend to decline earlier. Staggering a few new pullets into the flock each year is the gentler way to keep eggs coming.

4. Broodiness

A broody hen stops laying and sits. She will be flat and wide in the nest box, hot to the touch, growl or shriek when you reach under her, and stay there when the others are out.

Left alone she sits about 21 days. To break it, take her off the nest repeatedly, block the box, or put her somewhere with a wire floor and no bedding for two or three days so she cannot settle.

Some breeds — Orpingtons, Silkies, Cochins — do this constantly. It is worth knowing before you choose; best chickens for eggs covers which breeds go broody.

5. Stress

Underrated, and easy to miss because the trigger is often days earlier.

A fox at the fence that never got in, a dog, a new bird added to the flock, rehoming, a change of feed, building work nearby — any of these can stop laying for one to two weeks. Chickens are prey animals with rigid social structures, and both parts of that make them sensitive to disruption.

There is nothing to do but leave them alone and let the flock settle.

6. Age

Not sudden, so if the stop was abrupt this is not your answer. Production falls roughly 15–20% a year after year two, which over several years looks like a hen quietly retiring — covered in detail in how long hens keep laying.

7–9. The ones worth acting on

Heat. Sustained temperatures above about 90°F suppress laying, and chickens cope with heat far worse than cold. Shade, deep cool water, and airflow.

Nutrition. The usual culprit is treats. Scratch, corn, and kitchen scraps are low in protein, and a flock filling up on them is not getting the 16% protein and calcium that laying requires. Layer feed should be the bulk of the diet, with oyster shell offered free-choice and separately. Soft or shell-less eggs point squarely here.

Parasites and illness. Red mite feed at night, so check under the perches and in crevices after dark with a torch — not on the bird during the day. Look for pale combs, weight loss, lethargy, or laboured breathing. This is the point to involve a vet.