Broiler brooding temperature chart: day-old to market age

What is the broiler brooding temperature chart?

The broiler brooding temperature chart is the target air temperature a chick needs at each stage of its life, starting at about 33-34°C on day one and stepping down by roughly 2-3°C every week until it reaches the finishing comfort zone of 21-23°C around week five. It exists because a day-old chick cannot regulate its own body heat — it has no feathers and a tiny body mass — so the shed has to hold the heat for it until the bird can do that job itself, usually by the third week.

This chart is the single most useful number on a broiler farm because chicks cannot tell you when they are uncomfortable until the damage is already done. A chick that spends its first week a few degrees too cold diverts energy into staying warm instead of growing, and that lost week never comes back — the batch reaches market weight lighter, later, or both. A chick that gets too hot in week four stops eating and drinking normally, and feed conversion suffers for the rest of the cycle.

Below is the full day-by-day and week-by-week chart, how to read it correctly at bird height rather than at the thermometer on the wall, the mistakes that most often throw it off, and how an automated system holds the curve without someone walking the shed with a thermometer every two hours.

Broiler brooding temperature chart by day and week

These figures are measured at chick height — about 5 cm above the litter, under the brooder guard — not at the height of a person standing in the shed, where the air can read several degrees cooler. Adjust a degree or two either way for local climate, litter depth and stocking density; the chart is a starting point, the birds' behaviour is the final word.

• Day 1-3: 33-34°C at chick level, relative humidity 60-70%.
• Day 4-7: 32-33°C, easing off slightly as chicks start moving to the edge of the brooder ring.
• Week 2 (day 8-14): 29-31°C, brooder guards usually removed by day 10-14.
• Week 3 (day 15-21): 27-28°C.
• Week 4 (day 22-28): 24-26°C.
• Week 5 onward (day 29-market): 21-23°C, the finishing comfort zone for the rest of the cycle.
• In hot, humid weather, treat these as ceilings, not targets — the temperature-humidity index (THI) means the same reading feels hotter to the bird when humidity is high.

How to use the chart correctly, not just read it

A chart on paper is only as good as where and how you take the reading. Two mistakes make an accurate-looking chart give you the wrong answer: measuring air temperature at head height near the shed entrance instead of at chick level under the hover, and trusting one thermometer for a shed that may be several degrees warmer at one end than the other because of drafts, inlet placement or uneven heater coverage.

The chart is also a starting point, not a substitute for watching the birds. Chicks huddled tightly under the brooder, cheeping loudly and piling near the heat source, are telling you the shed is too cold regardless of what the chart says. Chicks spread flat against the outer wall, panting with wings held away from the body, are too hot. Evenly spread, moving and eating normally across the whole floor is the sign the temperature is right — use the chart to set the target, and the birds to confirm it.

Common brooding mistakes that throw off the chart

Most brooding losses trace back to a handful of repeatable mistakes rather than anything exotic:

• Preheating too late — the litter and air should be at target temperature at least 24 hours before chicks arrive, not warmed up after the box opens.
• Removing brooder guards too early, before chicks can find their way back to heat, which lets weaker chicks chill in the corners.
• Stepping the temperature down too fast to save fuel cost, which stunts growth even though it looks fine on the meter for a few hours.
• One thermometer for the whole shed, which hides cold or hot pockets at either end, especially in long sheds during a power cut when fans stop and heat distribution changes.
• Ignoring humidity — very dry brooder air (below 50%) dehydrates chicks and dries out the navel, while very high humidity with warm air pushes birds into heat stress sooner than the temperature number alone suggests.
• Checking temperature on a fixed schedule (say, twice a day) instead of continuously, which misses the swings that happen overnight or during a sudden weather change.

Manual thermometer checks vs continuous monitoring

A wall thermometer checked a few times a day works, until the one time it doesn't — a heater that fails at 2 a.m., a curtain left open after a worker's shift, a sudden cold front. The chart tells you what the temperature should be; it does nothing to tell you when the shed has drifted away from it.

Continuous monitoring closes that gap by comparing the live reading in each zone of the shed against the chart target for the flock's current age, every few minutes, and raising an alert the moment the two diverge — not the next time someone happens to check. For a grower running several sheds, that difference is the gap between catching a problem in minutes and finding it the next morning.

• Manual check: reading taken 2-4 times a day, usually at one point in the shed, dependent on someone remembering to do it.
• Continuous monitoring: readings taken every few minutes from multiple points at bird height, checked automatically against the age-adjusted target.

How IoT monitoring holds the brooding chart automatically

An IoT system places temperature and humidity sensors at bird height in each zone of the shed and streams the readings to the cloud, where they are compared against the brooding chart for the flock's actual age — not a fixed number someone set once and forgot. When a zone drifts toward chilling or heat stress, the system raises a staged phone-call alert to the owner and the supervisor, so the response happens in minutes rather than at the next scheduled walk-through.

Because brooding failures often coincide with power cuts — the heater and the fan both stop at once — the alerting is built to run on battery backup and fall back to SMS or a voice call when the shed's network connection is weak. Temperature is one part of a full setup; see how it fits with ventilation, ammonia and the life-safety alarm in our guide to IoT for poultry farms, or read more on age-curve alerting and heat stress in our guide to poultry house temperature monitoring.

Choosing a monitoring system to hold the chart for you

If you are comparing options for your farm, look for these:

• Age-curve logic built in, so an alert means the shed is actually off-target for the flock's current age, not just outside a fixed number.
• Multiple sensors per shed at chick height, with per-zone readings so a cold corner or hot end is flagged, not averaged away.
• Humidity tracking alongside temperature, since a dry brooder or a humid heat-stress day both need a different response than temperature alone shows.
• Phone-call alerts with staged escalation, plus battery backup, so the alarm still fires during a power cut.
• Full history per shed and per batch that you own, so you can compare how this batch's brooding held up against the last one.

Get the brooding curve right this batch

A brooding chart is only useful if the shed actually holds it, day and night, including the two or three hours nobody is watching. See how sensor placement, ventilation and alerting work together for Indian sheds on our poultry farm monitoring page, or book a meeting with the MD to talk through your shed layout and flock size.