Pullets or straight run?

The premium, in numbers

Across 201 cases where one hatchery prices the same chicken breed both ways, a sexed pullet costs a median 25% more than a straight-run chick, and in 8 of them it costs no more at all. The median pullet is $8.49; the median straight-run chick is $6.69, and where cockerels are sold separately they run around $6.49.

Straight run is close to half cockerels, so six hens from straight run means buying about twelve chicks: around $80 at the median price, against about $51 for six sexed pullets, before feeding six cockerels for the weeks it takes to tell them apart.

Breed by breed

Listed prices per bird, whether or not in stock today, for the most widely sold breeds. Each breed page has every hatchery's prices.

When straight run makes sense

You want a rooster, or several. You plan to raise the cockerels for the table. Or the breed is one nobody sexes: many bantams, rare breeds and most ducks and geese are only sold straight run.

It makes less sense where roosters are not allowed, which includes many towns that permit hens, and when you have nowhere for the surplus to go. Rehoming cockerels is hard, and every keeper who bought straight run has learned that the same spring.

When a pullet is not a pullet

Vent and feather sexing at a day old is right most of the time and not all of it: the hatcheries here that state a figure quote 90%. Two ways round the odds are autosexing breeds, where chicks hatch in different patterns by sex (Cream Legbar, Bielefelder, the Pilgrim goose), and sex-link hybrids like the Red and Black Sex Link, which are sorted by down colour and come out close to certain.