How to Start Raising Chickens in the Philippines: Five Decisions in Order

On 1 July 2026 there were 228,489,122 chickens in the Philippines. 89,298,658 of them sat in holdings of 500 birds or fewer, which is 39.1% of the national flock. Two birds in five in this country live in something much closer to a bakuran than to a commercial house, so whatever you are about to start is not a hobby version of an industry. It is one of the main ways chickens are kept in this country.

Every beginner’s guide opens on how many chickens to get. Ilang manok ba ang pang-umpisa? On the figures this site keeps, that question cannot be answered first. It is fifth, and it is derived rather than chosen: three of the four decisions above it are locked on day 1 and cannot be managed down afterwards, while the head count is only ever the smallest of what your floor holds, what your buyer absorbs, and what your own quotes will fund.

What follows is that order, with the figure that puts each decision where it is. Every other page on this site assumes you have already picked a bird. This one is for the week before that.

Sino ang bibili, at sa anong market level

The buyer is the only side of this plan that comes with national figures attached, which is a strange thing to say about the side most beginners settle last. Ang mga kapitbahay, ang suki mo sa palengke, isang viajero na kukunin lahat sa isang umaga, o isang dressing plant na bumibili kada kilo. Those are four different prices for the same manok, and PSA measures the levels separately on purpose.

The one that matters most is the split inside the farmgate itself. PSA publishes two broiler farmgate series for the same month. The household one read ₱150.31/kg liveweight in June 2026 and the commercial establishment one read ₱118.69/kg liveweight, a gap of ₱31.62 per kilo. Which of the two is yours turns on the size of your holding rather than on who takes the birds, and a bakuran flock reads the household line.

Read down the right-hand column and the pattern is that every step away from your gate is somebody else’s income. That is not an argument for skipping the middle. A suki who takes ten birds every week can be worth more than a viajero who takes fifty once, kasi hindi naman ang pagbebenta ang mahirap sa broiler. Ang timing ang mahirap.

The market underneath all of it is domestic. PSA put the chicken meat self-sufficiency ratio at 91.9% for 2025, so almost everything eaten here is grown here and imports move the price at the edges rather than setting it. Hindi ka nakikipagbuno sa Brazil sa palengke. Ang kapitbahay mong nag-aalaga rin ang kalaban mo, at ang presyong pinapayag niya.

So name the buyer before you name the bird. If you cannot name one, that is a real answer and the rest of this page will not fix it. An hour spent on which Philippine prices are actually published is worth more at this stage than any amount of reading about breeds.

Which bird, and what that buys you in time

What separates those rows is not difficulty. It is how long you wait before you find out whether you are any good at this. A broiler batch answers that in five weeks. Halos limang buwan bago ka makarating sa parehong sagot sa layer, at tuloy-tuloy ang gastos sa feeds sa buong panahong iyon.

The 139 is worth stating precisely, because it is routinely misquoted. It is the day Hy-Line Brown reaches 50% production, not the day the first egg appears. First eggs arrive meaningfully earlier and they arrive slowly, which is a different thing from a flock that is paying for itself. It is also a cage-housing standard measured in a controlled environment, and a Philippine open-sided kulungan is not that. The rest of the layer arithmetic, including what a hen is worth when she stops, sits in raising layers in a Philippine backyard; the spent hen read ₱117.47/kg liveweight at the June 2026 farmgate.

On the broiler row, ₱150.31/kg at the 1.6 to 1.7 kg the local market actually wants comes to about ₱255.53 of liveweight per bird, gross, before a single peso of gastos comes off it. Divide that across the days each bird occupies the kulungan and the broiler and the native bird land a long way apart, which the native chicken page works through properly.

Native chicken is a different business rather than a slower version of the same one. The birds are small, the price per kilo is high, and the eggs are their own product at ₱8.61 per piece against ₱6.74 for a commercial egg in June 2026. Kung native ang pipiliin mo, mas mahaba ang hintay at ibang buyer ang hahanapin mo, dahil hindi lahat ng bumibili ng broiler ay handang magbayad ng native price.

Each row has a page of its own. Read the one you picked. Reading all three is how a beginner spends a week and decides nothing.

Raising broilers in a Philippine backyard Read the full guide

One batch of 50, day 1 to harvest, with a Philippine figure wherever one exists and an honest blank where none does.

About 35 days a batch

Native chicken, and why it is a different business Read the full guide

The premium per kilo is real and sourced. The profit is not computable yet, and the page says which half is missing.

About four months a batch

Layers in a Philippine backyard Read the full guide

What the flock eats before it pays, what an egg costs in feed, and what a hen is worth when she stops.

139 days to 50% production

What starting 20, 50 or 100 birds costs Read the full guide

One line on the startup sheet has a published Philippine price and it is the wrong one for you. What the published figures do settle is which flock size is worth starting at.

20, 50 and 100 compared

The floor is fixed on day 1, and it is measured in kilos

Floor area is the one input here that cannot be renegotiated after the sisiw arrive. A feed price can be shopped. A buyer can be replaced. Limang metro kuwadrado sa likod ng bahay, limang metro kuwadrado pa rin iyon sa araw ng benta.

The Philippine figure comes from PNS/BAFS 262:2018, the free-range chicken standard, and § 6.3.1 states the broiler density twice for fixed housing: 10 birds/m² or 17 kg/m², whichever binds first. Layers and native type get a flat 6 birds/m² with no weight attached. The two broiler limits give the same answer at 1.7 kg of liveweight, and above that weight the kilos are what bind while the bird count stops mattering.

There is a reason the standard states it twice rather than once. A bird count is easy to apply and stops describing anything once the birds get heavy, so the mass limit exists to catch the case the count rule misses. Apply the count rule alone to broilers carried to 2.5 kg and you have put 25 kg of live bird into a square metre rated for 17, which is roughly half again as many birds as the standard allows in that space. The count rule and the mass rule are not two ways of saying the same thing; they diverge in the direction that costs you birds in the hot months.

That is also why the floor sits above the head count instead of below it. A day-old chick weighs about 40 g and a market broiler weighs forty times that, so a coop sized to the birds you are putting in is a coop sized for the wrong week. Sukatin mo ang sahig para sa araw ng benta, hindi para sa araw ng dating ng sisiw.

The two limits and where they cross are worked out row by row for backyard flock sizes. Take your own dimensions to the calculator and come back with a number, because a floor you have measured is worth more at this stage than a flock size you have imagined.

One caveat travels with every figure above. PNS 262 describes free-range production, and most Philippine backyard flocks are confined, often fully. For meat birds and for native type raised for meat, no Philippine body publishes a stocking density for a closed coop at all, and that sits in this site’s register as gap G-18. For hens the gap is closed, in a different standard: PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.2 sets a cage-free space requirement of 0.14 m² per bird in single-tier housing and 0.1 m² multi-tier, and its § 1 scopes it to smallholder and native chicken farmers keeping birds in a building, room or enclosed area. Saradong kulungan iyon, iba lang ang tawag. It is also tighter than the 6 birds/m² that PNS 262 gives a layer inside a free-range house, from the same bureau.

Ang tatlong presyo na kailangan mong lakarin

Your plan has no cost side yet, and no amount of reading will give it one. Three prices decide whether a batch clears, and you have to walk to a counter and ask for all three.

Ang sako ng feeds. The largest single gastos in any batch is the one with no current published Philippine price. Not BAI, not PSA, not the millers. It sits in the register as gap G-15, and eight routes to a sack price were checked in a single day: two of them came back with published pesos, a government tender ceiling and an eight-year-old per-ton figure, and neither one records a bag anybody bought. What exists instead is your dealer’s number, on a particular day, for one brand and one tier. Ask for the sack weight in the same breath as the price: a 25 kg bag and a 50 kg sack quoted side by side are two different quantities wearing one word, and the division that makes them comparable sometimes reverses which one is cheaper. The feed cost tool asks you for that figure instead of supplying one, for the same reason.

Ang sisiw. One of the three is published, and it is not the one you will pay. BAI monitors day-old chick farmgate weekly and had it at ₱33.50 per head for the week of 13 July 2026 (BAI weekly report), which is an integrator and wholesale figure rather than the counter price an agri-supply quotes you for 20 sisiw. Fifty chicks at that figure is ₱1,675, and that is a floor, never a budget. Gap G-16 is logged partial for that reason: BAI closed the farmgate half, and what a dealer quotes a backyard keeper is still unpublished.

Ang materyales ng kulungan. Nothing at all, nationally. Coco lumber, GI sheet, chicken wire and nails are priced by whichever hardware you walk into, and no series exists for any of them. Ito ang linyang madalas mali sa panimulang budget, kasi materyales lang ang binibilang at nakakalimutan ang paggawa.

So the useful version of this step is not a number. Kunin mo ang tatlong quote, isulat mo ang petsa at ang brand sa tabi ng bawat isa, at itanong mo kung cash ba iyon o may 30 days. Iyon ang cost side ng plano mo, at wala kang mapagkukunan noon sa kahit anong website.

Only now, the head count

Ilang manok? Not a number you pick. It is whatever your floor, your buyer and your own quotes all allow at the same time, which in practice means the smallest of the three.

Start with the floor, because it is usually the binding one. A 5 m² kulungan under the PNS 17 kg/m² fixed-housing limit carries 85 kg of live bird, which at a 1.7 kg harvest weight is 50 broilers. The bird-count line gives the same 50 at that weight, which is exactly why 1.7 kg is where the two rules meet.

Now put the buyer against it. Kung sampung manok kada linggo lang ang kaya ng suki mo, that is five weeks of selling for a batch that all reached weight inside the same seven days. Hindi naghihintay ang broiler. Every extra week is feeds spent on a bird that already hit the weight your buyer asked for, and the bird does not get more valuable for having eaten them.

Then the quotes. Fifty chicks at the BAI figure is ₱1,675, and that is the smallest line in the whole batch rather than the one to worry about. What fifty broilers actually cost end to end is built around the feed price you supply, and the price the batch has to clear falls out of the same inputs. Run both with your own three quotes rather than with anybody’s example figures.

Kung magkakaiba ang sagot ng tatlo, ang pinakamaliit ang susundin mo. Madalas ang sahig iyon.

Notice what none of that could have been answered on day 1. The head count needed a harvest weight, which needed a bird. It needed a buyer’s weekly volume. It needed three prices that only exist at a counter in your own town. Ask it first and the number you get is one somebody else made up, usually somebody selling chicks.

The failure that follows from asking it first is common enough to name. Bumili muna ng 100 sisiw kasi mura, tapos gagawa ng kulungan, tapos maghahanap ng bibili. By week four the birds are at the weight the coop was never sized for, the buyer is whoever happens to be around, and the batch is sold at whatever that person offers. Nothing about that sequence is recoverable once the chicks are in the box.

Three things to stop looking for

You will spend the first month hunting for figures that do not exist, and the hunting feels like preparation. Stop early on these.

A national feed sack price. There is none, for any brand or any tier, and no agency is working on one. A full day of searching yields a tender ceiling and a 2018 industry illustration, which is what a morning yields too (gap G-15). Ang dealer mo ang pinagmumulan ng numerong iyan, at siya lang.

A reliable profit-per-bird number. The one you will be handed is somebody’s spreadsheet with a feed price in it that is not yours, and feed is the line that decides the answer. Profit per bird is an output of three inputs you have to supply yourself, which is why the break-even page asks for your sack price before it will produce anything. Any page that gives you a peso-per-bird figure without first asking what you paid for feeds has invented it, and the invention is usually optimistic, because a number published to persuade you into a batch has no reason to be conservative about the largest cost in it.

A backyard performance benchmark. The number you will be given is a feed conversion band of 1.50 to 1.83, and it is worth knowing exactly what that band is before you plan against it. It comes from Datuin et al. (2022), a survey of 55 commercial broiler farms, 48 of them contract growers, and only those growers were split by housing. Sixteen were open-sided, and the band belongs to them. Its Table 5 is headed broiler production performance targets of growers based on type of housing, and the same paper records that a third of the growers meet their targets only sometimes or not at all. So it is a target that a third of a commercial population miss, quoted to backyard keepers as a measurement of what they should expect. Real open-sided feed conversion sits at or above it, and a plan built on 1.50 is a plan built on the best case of a population you are not in. Nobody has published a feed conversion, mortality or growth figure for a bakuran flock at all, which is gap G-1, and what the brochure curves actually describe is the account of why.

What day 90 decides

Day 90 is not the day you decide whether to continue. It lands somewhere completely different depending on which bird you chose, and that is the clearest evidence that the bird decision was the one that mattered.

On broilers you are two batches and a bit in, with two harvests behind you and two sets of real figures: what the sacks actually cost, how many birds reached the day of sale, what the buyer actually paid on the day rather than what PSA published for the month. Two batches is also the first point at which a difference between them means anything, because one batch is a result and two is the beginning of a range. A keeper at day 90 on broilers has more usable information about their own yard than any published Philippine source can supply about it.

On native chicken your first batch is close and unsold. You have a feed bill, no revenue, and about another month before there is any arithmetic to do.

On layers, day 90 tells you almost nothing. The Hy-Line Brown standard puts 50% production at day 139, so the flock is still 49 days short of paying, and every one of those days is feeds.

So the question worth asking at day 90 is narrower than continue-or-stop: which single line in the plan would have to change for the next batch to work? Four of the five barely move. The kulungan is built. The buyer is the buyer. The bird is a horizon you already committed to, and switching restarts the clock at day 1. What moves is the three prices, and they move by a few pesos a sack, a few pesos a chick, and by whether you asked more than one dealer.

That is a smaller answer than most beginners expect. Kung isang linya lang ang pwede mong baguhin sa susunod na batch, malamang presyo ng feeds iyon. Nasa paglalakad iyon, wala sa pagbabasa.

And if you started with day-old layer chicks, day 90 will not tell you even that much. You committed to a 139-day horizon the morning they arrived, and of everything on this page it is the one thing a good month cannot shorten.

Questions people actually ask

How do I start raising chickens in the Philippines?

Settle five things, in this order. Who buys the birds and at which market level, because that decides which published price is your revenue. Which bird, because that fixes how long you wait: roughly 35 days for a broiler, about four months for native chicken, and 139 days before a Hy-Line Brown layer reaches 50% production. How much floor you have, measured at the weight the birds reach on sale day rather than at the size they arrive. What a sack of feeds, a day-old chick and your coop materials actually cost at your own suppliers, because only the chick price is published nationally. The head count comes last and is not really chosen: it is the smallest of what the floor holds, what your buyer can absorb in a week, and what your quotes will fund.

Which chicken should a beginner raise in the Philippines? Show the answer

The choice is mostly a choice about time. A broiler is ready in about 35 days and sold at ₱150.31 per kilo liveweight at the PSA household farmgate in June 2026. Native chicken takes roughly four months and earned ₱223.95 per kilo liveweight in the same month. A layer pullet eats for 139 days before the Hy-Line Brown standard puts her at 50% production, and then pays ₱6.74 per egg at the June 2026 farmgate. A first-time keeper learns fastest from the shortest cycle, because a broiler batch produces real numbers for feed cost, mortality and selling price inside six weeks, while a layer flock produces none for nearly five months.

How much money do you need to start raising chickens in the Philippines? Show the answer

There is no national answer, because only one of the three costs is published. The Bureau of Animal Industry monitored day-old chicks at ₱33.50 per head for the week of 13 July 2026, which is an integrator and wholesale farmgate figure rather than the counter price an agri-supply quotes for twenty chicks, so ₱1,675 for fifty chicks is a floor and not a budget. No Philippine agency publishes the price of a sack of finished feed, for any brand or tier, and none publishes coop materials. Get three local quotes for feeds and for lumber, note the date and the brand beside each, and ask whether the price is cash or thirty days. That is the cost side, and it exists nowhere else.

How long does it take to raise a chicken to selling size in the Philippines? Show the answer

About 35 days for a broiler grown to the 1.6 to 1.7 kg the local market wants, which is lighter and earlier than the 2.1 to 2.5 kg target used abroad. Native chicken is usually four months or more, and PNS/BAFS 262:2018 bars a free-range claim on any native chicken harvested before day 90. Layers are the outlier because they are not sold, they are kept: Hy-Line Brown reaches 50% production at 139 days and peaks in week 26, so the first four and a half months are cost with no revenue in them at all.