Raising Backyard Chickens in the Charlotte Area

Yes, you can keep backyard chickens around Charlotte, though whether you can, and how many, really comes down to which town you live in. The rules shift at the county line and sometimes even at the town line down the street, so a little homework up front saves a lot of headache later.

That’s what this guide is for. Before you bring home your first chick, it helps to know what’s legal where you live, how to build a coop that can take a Carolina summer, how to keep the hawks and raccoons out, which breeds actually thrive in our heat, and how to feed and manage a flock through the year. We’ve been raising chicks at 1900 Moore Road in Matthews for a long time now, and we’ve found that most of what trips people up is local, not chicken-keeping in general.

First question: can you even keep chickens where you live?

It’s worth starting here, because the most expensive mistake we see has nothing to do with feeding or brooding. It’s the person who builds a coop and buys six hens, only to find out afterward that their town caps them at six birds, or bans roosters, or asks for a 150-foot setback their quarter-acre lot simply can’t give.

The biggest divide in our area falls along the county line. On the Mecklenburg County side, which covers Matthews, Charlotte, Mint Hill, and the unincorporated county, the approach is permit-but-permissive. You pull a $40 annual permit, an inspector comes out once, and from there on there’s no hard cap on hens at all; the only real limit is density, set at 20 birds per acre. Roosters aren’t banned outright either, and if one turns into a noise problem that gets handled on its own. The same Charlotte-Mecklenburg Animal Care & Control office runs the permit for every one of those towns, so the rules feel consistent across that side of the line.

The Union County side is a different story, and it’s where most of the surprises live. Across Waxhaw, Indian Trail, Stallings, Weddington, Monroe, and the unincorporated county, the rules are stricter and they change from town to town. You’ll run into hard caps of six to ten hens, rooster bans in several towns, and across most of the county a 150-foot setback from every property line. That setback is the one people underestimate, because it quietly rules out chickens on most subdivision lots; getting 150 feet of clearance to all of your lot lines takes a genuinely big yard.

Here’s where each town stands as of mid-2026:

Where you live	Permit?	Max hens	Roosters	Coop setback
Matthews	Yes — $40/yr + $25 inspection	No fixed cap (20 per acre)	Allowed (noise rules apply)	25 ft from any property line
Charlotte	Yes — $40/yr, inspection	No fixed cap (20 per acre)	Allowed (noise rules apply)	25 ft from any property line
Mint Hill	Yes — $40/yr, inspection	20 per acre	Allowed (noise rules apply)	25 ft
Unincorporated Mecklenburg	Yes — $40/yr, inspection	No fixed cap (20 per acre)	Allowed (noise rules apply)	25 ft from any property line
Stallings	Yes — town permit	10 per acre (3 on a ¼ acre)	Not allowed	25 ft from a line; 30 ft from a neighbor’s house
Waxhaw	Yes — town permit	6 per lot	Not allowed	5 ft from the lot line; 30 ft from a neighbor’s house
Monroe	No	8 per lot (+1 per 1,000 sq ft over 10,000)	Not allowed	10 ft from a dwelling on the next lot
Weddington	No	No set number	County noise rules	150 ft from any property line
Indian Trail	No	No set number	County noise rules	150 ft from any lot line
Unincorporated Union County	No	No set number	County noise rules	150 ft from all lot lines

A few details don’t fit neatly into a table. In Matthews and Charlotte, for instance, the coop itself has to stand at least 18 inches tall and give each bird 4 square feet of floor space, on top of that 25-foot setback. Mint Hill turns out to be the friendliest of the bunch, since its zoning treats backyard chickens as household pets rather than livestock. Waxhaw will let hens out of the coop during the day, but only inside covered, temporary fencing, and Stallings asks that the coop sit up off the ground and limits you to one coop per property.

There’s a statewide piece worth knowing, too. North Carolina now asks every poultry owner to register for a free NCFarmID with the state Department of Agriculture, no matter the size of the flock, so they can reach you quickly if bird flu turns up near your zip code. It’s a quick thing to set up, and since requirements like this do change, it’s worth confirming the current version when you get started.

And then there’s your homeowners association, which is easy to forget. Your town can give you the green light while your neighborhood still says no, because plenty of HOAs around here restrict or outright ban backyard poultry in their covenants. That restriction sits on top of the town rule rather than replacing it, and a town permit won’t override a covenant, so it’s worth reading your HOA documents before you build.

The bottom line is to treat this table as your starting point rather than the final word. Rules change, and they tend to change quietly, so it always pays to pull up your own town’s current code or call the planning office before you build. If you’re not even sure which town or jurisdiction your property sits in, your county GIS lookup will tell you, and we’re always happy to help you sort it out at the store.

Before you bring chicks home

Chicks themselves are cheap. It’s everything around them that adds up, and that’s the part worth getting right before April rolls around.

A good place to begin is with how many. Our Chick Days birds come with a four-chick minimum, and four to six hens turns out to be the right size for most families anyway. Chickens are flock animals, so a single chick is a stressed and lonely chick, and because a healthy hen lays around 250 eggs in her first year, even half a dozen birds will bury most households in eggs. It’s better to start there than to talk yourself into twelve.

You’ll want a few things ready and waiting the day they arrive:

• A brooder, which can be as simple as a draft-free box or tub with walls about 12 inches high to start, set somewhere warm and out of the weather like a spare room, a garage, or a laundry room.
• A heat source, either a heat lamp or, more safely, a radiant heat plate the chicks can huddle under.
• A feeder and waterer sized for chicks, shallow enough that they can’t drown or tip them over.
• Chick starter feed, either medicated or non-medicated (more on that in a moment).
• Bedding in the form of pine shavings, never cedar, since the oils are hard on their lungs.
• A thermometer, because guessing at the brooder temperature is how chicks end up chilled.

The coop is the big-ticket item, and the good news is that the chicks won’t need it for about six weeks. They’ll live happily in the brooder indoors until they’re feathered, which conveniently gives you a head start to build or buy the right coop while they grow. Plan on a little daily time as well, since chicks need checking a few times a day for those first couple of weeks. It isn’t hard work, just steady.

Cost tends to be the other early question. The birds are the cheap part at a few dollars a chick, so the real money goes into the setup. Brooder gear runs fairly modest, about what you’d spend on a nice dinner out, while the coop is the number that varies the most, from a couple hundred dollars for a small ready-made coop up to considerably more for a bigger or built-from-scratch setup. After that it’s mostly feed, and since a laying hen eats only about a quarter-pound a day, a 50-pound bag carries a small flock a good long while. If you’re going to spend anywhere, spend on the coop and the fencing, because that’s the place where cutting corners ends up costing you birds.

We carry all of it at 1900 Moore Road in Matthews, from brooders and heat plates to feeders, waterers, starter feed, and shavings, so you can usually walk out set up in a single trip.

The first six weeks: brooding baby chicks

For the first six weeks the whole job really comes down to three things, in this order: heat, clean water, and the right feed. Here’s how it tends to unfold week by week.

Heat comes first, and the trick is learning to read the chicks rather than fixating on the thermometer. You’ll start the brooder around 95°F directly under the lamp or plate and lower it roughly 5°F a week from there. The birds make it easy to tell how you’re doing: if they pile up under the heat and peep loudly they’re cold, if they press into the far corners and pant with their wings held out they’re too hot, and if they’re spread out and busy you’ve got it about right. A small adjustment to the lamp height or the wattage is usually all it takes. Across the six weeks the rough schedule looks like this:

• Week 1, around 95°F. They’re tiny and fragile at this stage, so check on them several times a day and keep an eye out for pasty butt (more below).
• Weeks 2–3, around 85–90°F. The down starts giving way to real feathers on the wings, and you’ll catch them attempting short, clumsy flights and testing out a low roost.
• Weeks 4–5, around 75–80°F. Now they’re mostly feathered, a good deal more active, and noticeably messier, which means it’s time for more room.
• Week 6, near room temperature. Fully feathered and, weather permitting, ready to move out to the coop.

It helps to give them more space as they grow into it. Half a square foot per chick is plenty the first week, but you’ll want closer to a square foot each by the time they’re a month old, because crowded chicks get bored and start picking at one another, and it’s far easier to give them room than to break that habit once it sets in.

Water and feed are the steady, daily part of the routine. Keep fresh water in front of them at all times and change it the moment it fouls, which it will do constantly. For the first day or two, a few clean marbles dropped in the waterer keep chicks from face-planting into it. Their starter feed is built for them, with more protein than adult feed and a smaller crumble, and the medicated version helps guard against coccidiosis, a common gut parasite; if your chicks were already vaccinated for it at the hatchery, you’ll want the non-medicated kind instead, so just ask us which you’ve got and we’ll know what came in. As they get bigger, raising the feeder and waterer to about the height of the chicks’ backs cuts way down on both spilled feed and dirty water.

There are a handful of things worth watching for in those early weeks, and none of them are hard to handle once you know what you’re looking at:

• Pasty butt, where droppings cake over the vent, is common in the first week. A gentle wipe with a warm, damp cloth clears it so the chick can pass waste again. It’s an easy fix, but it will kill a chick if it goes unnoticed.
• A chilled chick tends to stand apart, hunched up and off its feed. Warm it back up and double-check that the brooder is holding its temperature.
• Splay leg, when the legs slide out to the sides on slick footing, usually corrects itself with a small hobble for a few days; roughening the floor with a paper towel gives them something to grip.
• Coccidiosis shows up as lethargy along with blood in the droppings. That’s the one medicated starter is meant to guard against, so if you spot it, come talk to us.

One local note on our spring chicks: even though piedmont winters are fairly mild, a March brooder in an unheated Matthews garage still needs that supplemental heat. Mild outside simply isn’t warm enough for a day-old chick, so it’s best to hold the brooder temperature regardless of what the calendar says.

By around six weeks, once they’re fully feathered, they’re ready to graduate to the coop, which is exactly why the coop needs to be built and predator-proof before that day arrives.

Building a coop that holds up in Carolina heat and humidity

Most of the coop advice you’ll find online was written for cold climates, and ours is really the opposite problem. Around here it isn’t a hard freeze that takes a chicken down so much as a humid 96°F July afternoon, so it pays to build for heat first.

Ventilation does most of the heavy lifting. Hot, damp air has to be able to get out and move, which means vents placed up high, ideally on more than one side, and screened over with hardware cloth. NC State Extension sums up the goal nicely: free air movement in summer, warmth in winter, and ventilation without drafts down at the birds’ level. Open eaves, a ridge vent, or a pair of gable vents all give that heat somewhere to escape.

It’s smart to size the coop generously while you’re at it. The rule of thumb is 4 square feet per bird inside the coop and 8 to 10 per bird out in the run, because crowding birds together in our summer humidity is a reliable way to invite both sickness and feather-picking. With chickens, a little extra space is always the safer mistake to make.

Inside the coop, hens want to sleep up on roosts rather than down on the floor. Plan on 8 to 12 inches of roost bar for each bird, set a bit higher than the nest boxes, since they’ll always head for the highest spot to sleep and you’d much rather that be a roost than a box of eggs. A flat 2×4 with the wide side facing up beats a round dowel here, because on cold nights the hens settle down over their own feet and keep their toes tucked warm. Nest boxes are simpler than people expect: one box for every three or four hens is plenty, as they’re happy to share and wait their turn. Make each one about 12 inches square, bed it soft, set it a little lower and dimmer than the roost, and collect the eggs daily so nobody develops a taste for them.

A small “pop door” lets the birds move in and out of the coop to the run, and since the run is where they’ll spend most of their day, that’s where the bigger space requirement and the need for shade come in. A run that bakes in full sun all afternoon is genuinely rough on hens in a Charlotte summer, so it helps to shade part of it, whether with a tarp, a shade tree, or simply by siting the run where it catches the afternoon shade. On the worst July days, a box fan pushing air through the coop makes a real difference, and you’ll find your birds parked right in front of it.

For bedding, a few inches of pine shavings on the floor does the job. A lot of keepers like the deep litter method, where you keep adding fresh shavings on top through the cold months and let the bottom layer slowly compost down (it even throws off a little warmth as it goes), then do one full clean-out come spring. If that’s not your style, scraping and refreshing more often works just as well. Whichever route you take, the real goal is keeping things dry, since wet, packed litter is where ammonia and disease tend to start. A droppings board under the roost, scraped every few days, catches most of the overnight mess before it builds up.

Winter, happily, is the easy season here. Chickens are far more cold-hardy than they are heat-hardy, and a piedmont winter barely registers for a fully feathered hen, so you can skip the heat lamp altogether; it’s a genuine fire risk and they don’t need it anyway. What they do want is a coop that stays dry and draft-free down at roost level while still venting up high. That can sound contradictory, but it isn’t, because the real danger in winter is trapped moisture rather than cold air, and sealing the coop up too tightly does more harm than the weather ever would.

It’s also the moment to mind those setbacks, which brings us back to the rules at the top: 25 feet from the property line in the Mecklenburg towns, and 150 feet across Union County. Settle on the coop’s spot before you build rather than after, since relocating a finished coop is nobody’s idea of a good weekend. And it’s well worth building it predator-tight from the very start, because a secure coop is far easier to build than to retrofit once something has already found its way in. Around here, sooner or later, something will try.

Predator-proofing for a Charlotte-area backyard

A backyard flock in our area faces more predators than most people expect, even in fairly ordinary suburban neighborhoods. It helps to know who’s actually coming and what stops each one.

• Hawks and owls are the aerial threat, with red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks hunting by day and owls by night. Both are federally protected, so you can’t legally shoot, trap, or harm them, which leaves a covered run as the real answer: netting or wire over the top, along with clearing away nearby perches they like to hunt from.
• Raccoons are the clever ones. They’ll reach right through chicken wire and pull a bird apart piece by piece, and they’re good enough with their hands to work a simple latch, which is exactly why hardware cloth beats chicken wire and why your latches need to be the kind a toddler couldn’t open.
• Foxes and coyotes are both around, and yes, coyotes do turn up in suburban Charlotte. Since they’ll dig under and jump over, a buried barrier paired with a covered run takes care of both.
• Opossums and rat snakes both go after eggs and young chicks, with snakes able to slip through gaps as small as a half-inch, so every opening needs hardware cloth over it.
• Loose dogs are, by a wide margin, the most common killer of backyard flocks, usually a neighbor’s dog and often in broad daylight. A solid, secure run is your best defense here.

The construction that stops nearly all of it really comes down to a few good habits. Use half-inch hardware cloth rather than chicken wire, keeping in mind that chicken wire only keeps chickens in and does nothing to keep predators out. Bury that wire, too: NC State Extension recommends running it at least 6 inches deep around the perimeter, or bending it outward into a 12-inch apron along the ground, so that diggers hit it and give up. Put a wire or solid roof over the run, since a top is what turns it from mostly safe into genuinely secure, and it’s also what keeps those protected hawks and owls out without putting you on the wrong side of the law. Fasten the wire to the outside of the posts so a determined animal can’t simply lean on it and push it in. And finish with real latches, where a spring-loaded one or a clipped carabiner beats a plain hook, then get in the nightly habit of closing the pop door, since the great majority of losses happen after dark.

If something does manage to get in, the damage it leaves behind usually points to the culprit. A bird gone with no trace tends to mean a hawk during the day or, at night, an owl, fox, or coyote. A bird killed with the head missing is most often a raccoon, hawk, or owl. Missing eggs or chicks with feathers scattered around suggests a snake, rat, or raccoon, while bites all over the body point squarely at a dog. Once you know who paid the visit, you’ll know which gap needs closing.

Which breeds actually fit the piedmont

A breed that thrives up in Vermont can really struggle through a Matthews August, so it’s worth picking for our climate from the start.

NC State Extension singles out Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks as heritage breeds that do well in North Carolina conditions, prizing them as hardy, steady layers that hold up over several seasons. For a mix of dependable eggs and durability, they also point to Plymouth Rocks, New Hampshires, Sussex, and Wyandottes, and they describe sex-link hens like the Black Sex Link as excellent layers, which goes a long way toward explaining why they’re one of the most popular backyard birds going. Where our heat is concerned, a couple of rules of thumb help: single-comb breeds shed heat a little better through that comb, while the heavily feathered, feather-footed Brahmas are built for cold and simply want real shade and airflow once July arrives.

Here’s how all of that maps onto the breeds we bring in for Chick Days:

• Rhode Island Red, the workhorse of the bunch. Heat-tolerant and good for a brown egg nearly every day, which is awfully hard to beat for a first flock.
• Columbian Wyandotte, a hardy dual-purpose bird that’s calm and well-suited here, though it wants shade and airflow through our summers.
• Black Sex Link, a top-tier brown-egg layer that’s also easygoing to keep.
• Easter Egger, the fun one, laying blue and green eggs with a friendly streak and no trouble in our heat.
• Welsummer, which gives you deep, speckled, dark-brown eggs and forages well besides.
• Buckeye, a hardy heritage breed with a frost-proof pea comb that handles our heat well too, as long as it has room to range.
• Dark and Buff Brahma, the gentle giants and reliable winter birds that just ask for a bit of shade come summer.

A mixed flock is the fun way to go, giving you different breeds, a basket of different egg colors, and the small bonus of being able to tell your hens apart at a glance. If you’re not yet sure which mix fits your yard and your egg goals, we go into more detail in our guide to choosing chicken breeds for your backyard, and you’ll find the lineup we’re carrying each season over on our Chick Days page.

Feeding your flock through the year

Feed shifts with age, and a little with the season, and once you’ve learned to match the feed to the bird you’ve handled most of nutrition.

• Chick starter, from hatch to about 8 weeks, runs around 18–20% protein and comes sized for chicks.
• Grower, from roughly 8 to 16 weeks, eases the protein back as they grow out, with no extra calcium just yet.
• Layer feed, starting around 18 weeks once they begin laying, sits at about 16% protein and is built with the calcium a laying hen burns through making shells.

The one timing rule that genuinely matters is not switching to layer feed too early, since all that extra calcium is hard on the kidneys of birds that aren’t laying yet. It’s best to wait for that first egg, around 18 weeks, and make the transition then.

It also helps to understand that grit and oyster shell are two different things, and that hens need both. Grit is the small, hard stones a hen stores in her gizzard to grind up her feed, which she’ll need if she isn’t ranging on bare ground to pick up her own. Oyster shell, on the other hand, is calcium for strong shells, and the easiest approach is to leave it out in its own dish, free-choice, so each hen can top off exactly what she needs.

When it comes to treats, it’s worth remembering they’re candy rather than dinner. Scratch grains, kitchen scraps, and garden trimmings are all fine in moderation, but keeping them under about 10% of the diet protects your egg production, and it’s best to skip avocado, raw dried beans, anything moldy, and heavy salt or sugar altogether.

Water deserves just as much attention as feed, since a hen that runs short on water stops laying in a hurry, and that bites hardest through a piedmont summer. Keep it cool, shaded, and set out in more than one spot so a bossy hen can’t stand guard over the only source. Come winter, a heated base keeps it from freezing solid, which matters because frozen water is the same as no water.

We keep starter, grower, layer, oyster shell, grit, and scratch in stock at the store, and we’ll deliver it locally if hauling 50-pound bags around isn’t your idea of a good time.

Growing and managing your flock

Adding new birds is one of those things that goes much better with a little patience. Rather than tossing newcomers straight in with the established hens, which tends to end in bloodshed over the pecking order, it’s worth quarantining the new birds for a couple of weeks first, since sick birds don’t always look sick. From there, integrate them slowly by housing the two groups side by side where they can see but not reach each other for a week or so, then letting them mingle with plenty of space and more than one feeder on hand. The pecking order still sorts itself out, just with far less fighting along the way.

Every so often a hen will go broody, settling onto the nest, puffing up, and refusing to budge as her instinct to hatch eggs takes over. If you happen to have a rooster and want chicks, you can simply let her at it. If not, she’s just sitting there not laying and slowly running herself down, so it’s kinder to break the spell by lifting her off the nest regularly or cooling her underside down for a day or two, and she’ll come back around soon enough.

Once a year, usually from late summer into fall, your hens will molt. They’ll drop a surprising number of feathers, look thoroughly ragged for a while, and stop laying for a month or two as they put the new feathers back on. It’s entirely normal, and a higher-protein feed through the molt helps them rebuild a little faster, with the eggs returning once their fresh feathers have grown in.

It’s worth knowing how long they’ll keep laying before you ever bring them home. A hen lays best through her first two or three years, turning out something like 250 eggs that first year and then tapering off maybe 10 to 15% each season after. They’ll keep laying beyond that, just fewer, and a healthy backyard hen often lives somewhere between 6 and 10 years, so it’s fair to think of a flock as a multi-year commitment rather than a one-season project.

Collecting and storing the eggs gets easy once you know the trick to it. Gather them daily, and a bit more often in summer heat, so they stay clean and nobody picks up an egg-eating habit. A fresh egg comes coated in a natural seal called the bloom, so it’s best not to wash it until you’re ready to use it; left unwashed, it’ll keep for weeks right on the counter, and only once it’s washed does it need to go in the fridge. And if you’re ever unsure whether one’s still good, just drop it in water, where a fresh egg sinks and lies flat while an old one floats.

Most health problems turn out to be preventable with a bit of routine attention. Every now and then, take a look around the vent and under the wings for mites and lice; a good dust bath of dry dirt or sand is the birds’ own first line of defense (they’ll dig out their own if you let them), and poultry dust clears up an outbreak if one takes hold. Keep an ear out for respiratory trouble, too, such as sneezing, wheezing, or runny eyes, since that spreads fast in a damp, poorly ventilated coop, which is one more reason good ventilation earns its keep. And it really is worth doing that free NCFarmID registration, since it’s how the state lets you know if bird flu shows up near your zip code.

A handful of mistakes come up again and again, and the nice thing is they’re all easy to sidestep once you’ve seen them coming:

• Leaning on treats and skimping on real feed, then wondering where the eggs went.
• Reaching for chicken wire instead of hardware cloth, which is the single most common fatal shortcut.
• Leaving the run without shade through a Carolina summer.
• Sealing the coop up tight in winter to keep them warm, only to lose birds to the trapped moisture.
• And the big one, not checking the local ordinance before building. Try not to be the cautionary tale from the top of this page.

Chicken keeping through the piedmont year

The work shifts along with our seasons, and it helps to picture the rough rhythm of a year around Charlotte.

Spring, from March into May, is chick season and the busiest stretch. It’s the natural time to do your big coop clean-out as the weather warms, to start a new batch of chicks in the brooder, and to enjoy the egg flood, since laying ramps up hard as the days stretch longer.

Summer, June through September, is really all about the heat. The job becomes keeping cool, shaded water out in more than one spot, putting shade over the run, and watching for signs of heat stress, which show up as panting, wings held away from the body, and a hen gone listless. A frozen jug or a pan of cool water helps on the worst afternoons, and a little electrolyte in the water carries them through a brutal week. Laying can dip in the peak heat, and that’s perfectly normal.

Fall, in October and November, is molt season. Your hens will drop their feathers, look ragged for a while, and pause their laying for a month or two as they regrow them, so it’s a good time to bump the protein and let nature take its course. The shorter days slow laying as well, and you can either add a few hours of morning light to keep the eggs coming or simply settle in for the winter breather.

Winter, December through February, is the easy season here, since a piedmont winter barely fazes a feathered hen. Mostly it’s a matter of keeping the water from freezing, keeping the coop dry and draft-free at roost level, and leaving the heat lamp in the box, while the deep litter quietly does its work and you get to do a little less.

One nice year-round bonus is the manure. Composted coop bedding is some of the best material you can work into a Carolina garden, though you’ll want to let it age a few months first, since fresh droppings are too “hot” and will burn your plants. Given that time to mellow, it turns into black gold for the spring beds.

When to start — and where to get chicks

There are really two answers to this one, and they don’t entirely agree.

The textbook answer comes from NC State Extension, which notes that chicks started in the fall, around October or November, tend to lay a little better in their first year than chicks started in March or April, especially in the milder parts of the state, simply because of how they mature into that first laying season.

The practical answer is that spring is chick season, plain and simple. It’s when the birds are available, when the weather makes brooding easy, and when nearly everyone gets started. A spring pullet absolutely still lays; she just comes into full production a bit later that first cool season. For most backyard keepers, spring ends up being the right call for the simple reason that it’s the season actually set up for it.

Either way, it’s worth planning for the wait, since pullets generally begin laying somewhere between 16 and 24 weeks depending on the breed and conditions. Chicks you bring home in March will have you in eggs by the middle or end of summer.

Around here, that’s Chick Days. Each spring we bring in waves of specific breeds, from Rhode Island Reds and Wyandottes to Brahmas and Easter Eggers and more, sold first come, first served, with a four-chick minimum and no pre-orders. Once a wave sells out it’s gone until the next one, so the breed lineup and the arrival dates go up on our Chick Days page each season.

Frequently asked questions

Do you need a permit to keep backyard chickens near Charlotte? It depends on your town. Matthews, Charlotte, Mint Hill, and unincorporated Mecklenburg County require a $40 annual permit plus a one-time inspection. Stallings and Waxhaw require a town permit, while Monroe, Weddington, Indian Trail, and unincorporated Union County don’t require one at all. It’s always best to confirm your town’s current rule before you build.

Are roosters allowed? Not everywhere. Roosters are banned in Stallings, Waxhaw, and Monroe, while they’re allowed, subject to noise rules, in the Mecklenburg towns and out in rural Union County. You don’t need a rooster for eggs anyway, which makes this an easy one to skip.

How many hens can I keep? It varies quite a bit. The Mecklenburg towns set no fixed cap, working instead off a limit of 20 birds per acre, while the Union County towns cap it hard at six in Waxhaw, eight in Monroe, and ten per acre in Stallings. It’s worth checking your town’s number before you buy.

Do I need a rooster to get eggs? No. Hens lay eggs whether or not there’s a rooster around. You only need a rooster if you want those eggs to hatch into chicks.

When can I get baby chicks in the Charlotte area? We run Chick Days each spring at 1900 Moore Road in Matthews, with waves of specific breeds sold first come, first served and a four-chick minimum. Keep an eye on our Chick Days page for the season’s lineup and dates.

What’s the minimum lot size for backyard chickens here? There’s no minimum in the Mecklenburg towns, while Stallings sets a quarter-acre minimum. Across Union County, in Weddington, Indian Trail, and the unincorporated areas, the 150-foot setback from every property line effectively calls for a large lot.

How many eggs will a few hens give me? A productive hen lays around 250 eggs in her first year, so four to six hens will keep most families in eggs with plenty left to share. Production dips in winter and during the annual molt, then picks right back up.

We’re here for the whole flock

We’ve been doing chicks at 1900 Moore Road in Matthews for a long time, and honestly we’d rather help you get set up right than sell you a bird that ends up in a coop the town makes you tear down. Come on in with your questions, whether it’s your address, your yard, or your egg goals, and we’ll point you toward the breeds, the feed, and the setup that actually fit.

We carry everything from brooder plates to layer feed to coop hardware, and we’ll deliver locally if you’d rather not wrestle the feed bags yourself. And when you’re finally ready for birds, Chick Days is where they land each spring.

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