a procedureEgg donation

A donor is screened and stimulated, her eggs are collected, and they are fertilised with the recipient's partner's sperm or with donor sperm; the resulting embryo goes into the recipient, whose own cycle is timed to match or suppressed and replaced with hormones. The recipient has no egg collection and needs no sedation of her own. What is bought is a stranger's ovarian reserve, and what varies across borders is whether that stranger may be paid, whether she stays anonymous, and how old the recipient is allowed to be.

Egg donation is where the price gap and the law gap point the same way, which is why it is the most travelled fertility treatment in Europe. The ESHRE taskforce that surveyed six destination countries found legal barriers leading the reasons patients gave for crossing a border at all, ahead of cost.

The pricing is unusually legible because the clinics are selling to people who are comparing across jurisdictions. Reprofit's price list, valid from 1 January 2026, puts "selection + STANDARD stimulation and compensation of the donor" inside a 5,525 EUR cycle — the donor's payment is a printed line item in a published Czech price, not an inference. The UK regulator sets the other kind of number: a cap. An egg donor in the UK may receive up to 985 pounds per donation cycle, raised from 750 pounds on 1 October 2024, and may not be paid more.

Trade practice — the clinics advertising to British, German and Nordic patients advertise anonymity, guaranteed blastocyst counts and short waiting lists, in that order. Which countries actually provide donor anonymity, under which instrument and on what date, belongs on the rule record rather than here, because it changes.

Inference — a guarantee of two blastocysts is a pricing device as much as a clinical one: it moves the risk of a poor cycle from the patient to the clinic and prices it, which is why the guaranteed packages cost roughly double the unguaranteed ones on the same list.

Three legal facts set the price and the destination. Whether the donor may be paid, and how much: a published cycle price that names donor compensation among its inclusions is a price from a jurisdiction that allows it, while a capped jurisdiction such as the UK produces a donor shortage rather than a cheaper cycle. Whether the donor stays anonymous: the UK ended anonymity for donations made after 1 April 2005, and a person conceived from such a donation can have the donor's name, date of birth and last known address at 18 — patients who want an unnamed donor cannot buy one at home. And who may be a recipient: statutory age limits and rules on marital status and sexual orientation sit in national law, not clinic policy. The rule records carry the country map with instruments and dates.

On the bill, the item to find is the eggs. Newlife IVF in Thessaloniki lists frozen donor-egg treatment from an external bank at 3,300 EUR and then names "donor egg cost" and the shipment of the eggs to the clinic among the exclusions: the cheapest donor-egg line on the page is the one that does not include the donor eggs. Medication for the recipient is excluded almost everywhere; Fertilab in Barcelona is unusual in stating that the donor's medication is inside its guaranteed-blastocyst price. UK donors are limited to creating children in up to ten families, which is a supply constraint rather than a price.

As of September 2026 the published donor-egg cycle prices read off clinic pages for this record run from 3,300 EUR in Thessaloniki without the eggs, through 5,525 EUR in Brno with donor compensation inside it, to 7,635 EUR in Barcelona with a blastocyst guarantee and 11,994 US dollars in New York state. A UK donor is capped at 985 pounds for the cycle that produces the eggs in any of those prices that were paid for under UK rules.

This page describes a treatment and the published prices and caps attached to it. It is not medical advice and it is not legal advice.