A Guide to Regular Upkeep and Maintenance of Chicken Coops 

Last Updated on September 28, 2025

If you have a chicken coop with hens in your backyard, keeping them healthy would easily be a priority for you. The key to keeping your chickens safe, happy, and healthy is to ensure they have good living conditions. This includes ensuring their home — hen coops — is clean. Keeping chicken coops clean and well-maintained requires a proper cleaning plan. Happy hens and excellent egg harvests essentially result from hygienic and clean coops. If you’re new to chicken coop maintenance, here are some tips that will help you. Follow these steps, and your hens will thrive!

1. Maintain a Daily Checklist

Preparing a checklist of aspects to focus on when cleaning the chicken coop daily can help ensure no cleaning step is missed. Begin your day by cleaning and refilling the food and water containers. It is imperative that your hens have access to fresh grains and that the food from the previous day is cleaned out, as the containers may collect debris and contaminate the food. Yet another task worth adding to your daily chicken coop maintenance checklist is keeping the bedding clean and dry to avoid any health issues. You might also want to check for eggs and collect them on a daily basis. Leaving the eggs in the coop may result in the eggs breaking and creating a mess. While this is a rough list of things, you may want to add more tasks to your checklist based on your needs. 

2. Plan Your Deep-Cleaning Days 

Ensuring the chicken coop is clean requires some planning. When you randomly clean the coop, you might be unable to track how regularly you clean it. Deep cleaning goes beyond cleaning the containers and extends to removing and replacing the bedding, scraping off hen droppings, and cleaning the chicken coop’s interior and exterior parts. Since this can be time-consuming, having specific days reserved for deep cleaning can ensure your hens have a clean and healthy environment. In short, you can spot-clean daily and deep-clean the coop once or twice a week. 

Pro Tip- When deep cleaning, consider using a handheld scrub brush to reach small crevices where dirt and bacteria can accumulate. This ensures a thorough clean and helps prevent any hidden buildup from affecting your hens’ health.

3. Pay Attention to The Condition of The Bedding 

The most common bedding materials are straws and wood shavings. When the bedding comes in contact with hen droppings, it can turn into compost. Therefore, keeping an eye out for decomposition is extremely crucial. This is all the more important during hotter days. Therefore, the bedding should be regularly cleaned and replaced every once in a while to prevent decomposition. 

4. Avoid Using Abrasive Cleaning Agents 

When cleaning the coop, using natural cleaning agents goes a long way in ensuring your hens are not exposed to questionable chemicals. You can deep-clean the chicken coop using natural agents, such as vinegar. While such agents keep bacteria and germs at bay, they also prove to be safe for your hens. 

5. Opt for The Right Coop Design 

Cleaning your chicken coop regularly can be tasking. However, investing in the right coop design can make your life easier. For instance, poultry coops with larger doors offer great access to the interiors, making it easy to clean harder-to-reach places. A coop with a pull-out tray floor is another element that makes cleaning easier. You can pull the tray out whenever you clean and replace the bedding as opposed to accessing the coop floor through the door. 

6. Clean During Seasonal Changes 

Cleaning your chicken coop properly can help you prepare your hens for the change, as there is a transition from one season to another. For instance, hens tend to spend more time indoors during winter. As the season changes, you can empty the coop and use a high-pressure water hose to clean the floor, walls, and corners. This is also a good time to use disinfectants and ensure the coop is germ-free and hygienic for the hens. Using these agents with the hens inside the coop can be tricky. Therefore, when you empty the coop during seasonal cleaning, it is a good idea to use germicides and bactericides for intense cleaning and disinfection. When the coop is clean and dry, you can lay fresh bedding, clean water, and food containers. 

Having access to fresh, healthy, and home-harvested eggs is always ideal. However, if you have a chicken coop or plan on getting one and growing hens in your backyard, it is important to know how you can care for your hens and their abode regularly. Keeping the coop clean can decide how healthy the hens and the eggs they lay are. Cleaning hen coops requires some knowledge, especially if you’re a beginner. Therefore, preparing a checklist of what aspects to focus on when cleaning, planning your cleaning regime, and knowing what products to use for cleaning can help you tackle this task with ease.