08/19/2026
🥚🐣 YOUR HATCH RATE MATH MIGHT BE WRONG! 🐣🥚
You set 60 eggs.
39 chicks hatch.
So your hatch rate is 65%, right? 🤔
Well… maybe. 👀
This is one of the biggest things I wish more people understood about incubating eggs:
🔥 FERTILITY RATE and HATCH RATE are NOT the same thing!
Let’s say you set 60 eggs in your incubator.
At candling, you discover:
🥚 10 were infertile/never developed
🐣 50 were fertile and developing
🐥 39 eventually hatched
There are actually a few different numbers we can look at:
🥚 Overall hatch rate:
39 chicks ÷ 60 eggs set = 65%
BUT…
🐣 Hatch rate of fertile eggs:
39 chicks ÷ 50 fertile eggs = 78%
That's a BIG difference!
Why does it matter?
Because your incubator cannot hatch an infertile egg. 😂
If you're trying to figure out whether you have an incubation problem, simply dividing chicks hatched by eggs set doesn't tell you the whole story.
For example:
🐓 Low fertility may point you toward your breeding flock — rooster-to-hen ratio, breeder age, nutrition, heat, mating success, etc.
🌡️ Lots of fertile eggs that quit developing makes me start looking harder at incubation conditions, egg handling/storage, breeder health, shipping damage, temperature, humidity and other factors.
🐣 Fully developed chicks that don't hatch can point us toward an entirely different set of possible problems.
This is why I like to track:
🥚 Total eggs set
🔦 Fertile/developing eggs
❌ Early quitters
❌ Late quitters
🐣 Chicks successfully hatched
Those numbers tell you WAY more than simply saying:
“I hatched 39 out of 60.”
And here's another important one…
📦 Shipped eggs deserve their own category!
A poor hatch from shipped eggs does NOT automatically mean the breeder sent you infertile eggs or that your incubator failed.
An egg can be fertile and still fail because of shipping trauma, damaged air cells, temperature exposure, rough handling and other factors completely outside your control.
💚 HATCHING TIP:
Keep a little hatch record for EVERY incubation.
After several hatches, patterns start jumping out at you — and that's when you can actually start troubleshooting instead of guessing.
🐣 So tell me… have you been calculating your hatch rate from ALL eggs set or only the fertile eggs? 👇🏼