How common are eggs with a double yolk?

According to the British Egg Information Service, one in every thousand eggs on average is a double-yolker.

Double-yolked eggs almost always come from young hens about 20-to-28 weeks old.

“In reality it gets its mechanics just slightly wrong. You get a young bird and it comes to lay its first egg and it releases more than one egg yolk. It forms a shell around the egg and out pops a rather large egg with two egg yolks in it.”

The chances of getting a double-yolk from one of these hens is much higher. One in every 100 eggs from these birds are double-yolk.

Source

I’m just impressed that there is a British Egg Information Service.

Though not rare the chances of finding a single double-yolk egg nowadays are less than one in 1,000.
They are not usually found in eggs bought from supermarket, because there the eggs are usually inspected by weight and by light, called candling. They’re typically only found in backyard or farmstead raised eggs. I remember being told they bring good luck and it’s a great curiosity for kids.

Double yolks are fun, but what’s really cool is when you crack your egg to fry it and there is a teeny tiny chicken atop the yolk.

Two for the price of one!

We had a chicken that often laid double yolks. They may have a genetic component much like twins in humans.

when I was a kid, we had them often. I now live back in Australia and I would say out of a 12 pack I get at least one or two. Battery? raised chickens and eggs are illegal here.

I’ve come across double yolks a few times, I’ve even found a triple yolk once. What really sucks though is coming across a bloody yolk. One time in culinary school I needed a ton of eggs for a recipe so I was just cracking one after the another into a bowl, one of the last ones I cracked turned out to be a bloody yolk and I didn’t notice till I added it to the rest. Time to start over—_—

Twins! As someone mentioned above, it s rare to find double yolks or even blood spots when buying the massed produced eggs at supermarkets because they are inspected. If you buy local eggs or even organic eggs at the supermarket, you are more likely to have blood spots in your eggs, I guess their inspection process doesn’t catch it, but even with organic I almost never see double yolks anymore like I used to.

Blood spots are safe to eat. You can just remove it with the tip of a knife if it bothers you. When I was very young someone once told me you have to throw out the egg if it has a blood spot, but it isn’t true.

By the way, from what I understand twin chickens making it to birth/hatch is very rare. Maybe someone else will know more about that.

When I was a kid we got all our eggs from a local farm and we often had double-yolkers. I have never seen one in a store-bought egg though. I guess inspection marks them as “unsuitable” They probably get sent to food processing factories instead.

We’ve been getting our eggs from local farms for about 3 years, and we’ve had two double-yolk occurrences. By my calculations, that is about 1 per 1,000.

The last dozen eggs I purchased at a local supermarket had three double yoke eggs. The eggs were sized as Jumbos.

As @Tropical_Willie mentioned, I also once bought jumbo eggs and found several double yolked eggs in the box. I think it almost never happens with most chickens but a few will lay several.

I kept chickens for about 10 years and had a few double yolks show up, just twin embroyos, the same odds for twins in most species.
@Dan_Lyons Ewww….that happened to me once, well, actually not me…I gave some friends some fresh eggs and must have collected a hidden egg that was had been being incubated by one of my hens. The family was cracking them in a skillet one morning with the kiddies when one dropped an almost ready to hatch chick into the frying pan. HORRIBLE! The poor kids.

I don’t know how common double-yolk eggs are, but when I was a kid, we could buy them by the dozen. I liked the tiny chicken eggs, better, though. 1” plus, practice eggs.

We got them a lot when we had chickens. Of course, we had Rhode Island Reds, and they are big chickens. I would say on average, 1 out of 20.