a procedureEgg freezing

The first half of an IVF cycle, stopped after the eggs are collected. Drugs stimulate the ovaries, the eggs are collected under sedation or general anaesthetic, a cryoprotectant is applied, and the eggs are vitrified and held in liquid nitrogen. Nothing is fertilised. Years later the eggs are thawed, injected with sperm and cultured, and that second treatment is bought again at the prices of the later year. The storage is invoiced annually in between.

Egg freezing is the fertility treatment whose price is most often quoted as a single number and least often paid as one. The UK regulator publishes the shape plainly: an average of 3,350 pounds to have eggs collected and frozen, medication a further 500 to 1,500 pounds, and storage on top at between 125 and 350 pounds a year. A ten-year store at the upper end doubles the headline.

It is also the treatment whose law changed most recently in a way that moved patients. Until 1 July 2022 most people in the UK could store eggs, sperm or embryos for ten years, with exceptions for premature infertility or fertility-damaging treatment; since that date the limit is up to 55 years from the date of first storage. Before it, a storage clock running out was a reason to move gametes across a border.

Trade practice — the marketing is age-shaped and the arithmetic is age-shaped, and they point opposite ways: the eggs worth freezing are the ones a patient is least likely to think she needs. The CDC's national rows put 9.2% of all US ART cycles in 2022 down to fertility preservation, and 11.5% among patients aged 35 to 37 — the band where the decision is usually taken late.

Inference — the denominator that would answer the question is not a success rate at all but a use rate, which no register in this batch publishes: how many people who froze eggs came back, thawed them, and had a child.

Bought in two instalments and usually in two countries' worth of price lists. The collection-and-freeze end is cheap relative to a full cycle — 2,190 EUR in Brno including a year of storage, from 2,480 EUR in Thessaloniki, 2,570 EUR in Barcelona with three years of storage folded in. The thaw end is the second bill: Reprofit prices IVF with the patient's own frozen eggs at 1,925 EUR, with screening, sperm-selection add-ons and refreezing outside it, and thawing of eggs alone at 340 EUR.

Two legal facts move this treatment across borders rather than the price. First, how long storage may lawfully run, and what happens at the end of it: the UK's shift from ten years to 55 years on 1 July 2022 removed the commonest reason British patients moved gametes abroad. Second, what the eggs may later be used for and by whom — the rules on donor use, posthumous use and export are national and sit with the rule records, not here. A store is a contract with a jurisdiction as much as with a clinic.

As of September 2026 the published collection-and-freeze prices read off pages for this record run from 2,190 EUR in Brno to 3,350 pounds as the UK regulator's own stated average, with stimulation drugs outside every one of them and storage invoiced yearly. The UK regulator's page for this treatment publishes no success rate and points readers to individual clinics for figures at their own age.

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