How Long to Boil Eggs? A Timing Guide for Every Doneness

Start with water at a rolling boil, not a simmer, and lower a large, fridge-cold egg in gently with a spoon. From that moment: 6 minutes for a soft-boiled egg with a fully runny yolk, 8 to 9 minutes for a jammy, spoonable medium yolk, and 11 to 12 minutes for a hard-boiled egg with a fully set, pale yellow yolk (not the grey-green ring you get from overcooking). These times assume the egg goes into water that’s already boiling, not water you bring up to a boil with the egg already in it, since that “cold start” method adds several unpredictable minutes.

A jumbo egg needs about a minute longer than a large egg at every doneness level, since there’s simply more white and yolk to cook through. A room-temperature egg cooks slightly faster than one straight from the fridge, by about 30 seconds. Neither difference is huge on its own, but stacked together they can be the gap between a jammy yolk and a fully hard one. If you’re cooking eggs straight from the fridge, which is most people most of the time, the times above already account for that.

This is exactly why the timing matters so much for a dish like Chef Francis Mallmann‘s Oeuf À La Coque, a classic French soft-boiled egg served in its shell with toasted “soldiers” for dipping. It only works if the yolk is soft enough to dip into but the white is fully set, a window of about 30 seconds. It’s a simple dish with almost nothing to hide behind, which is exactly why getting the timing right matters more here than in almost any other egg preparation.

An egg keeps cooking from residual heat for a minute or two after it leaves the water, which is enough to turn a perfect jammy yolk into an overcooked one by the time it’s cool enough to eat. Moving the egg straight into a bowl of ice water for at least a minute stops that carryover cooking at the exact doneness you timed for. It also makes the egg easier to peel, since the sudden temperature change helps the membrane release from the shell.

Eggs that are a week or so old peel more easily than very fresh ones, since the air pocket inside grows as the egg ages, giving the shell more room to separate from the white. After the ice bath, crack the shell all over by rolling the egg gently on the counter, then peel starting from the wider end, where that air pocket sits. Peeling under a thin stream of running water helps wash away small shell fragments as you go.

A batch of hard-boiled eggs is one of the few things worth cooking ahead on purpose. Left unpeeled in the fridge, they keep for about a week, the shell acting as a barrier against both moisture loss and other fridge odors. Peel them only right before eating rather than in advance, since a peeled egg dries out and picks up fridge smells within a day or two. If you’re timing a batch to last the week, aim for the firmer end of the range, closer to 12 minutes, since a fully set yolk holds up to a few days of storage better than a jammy one does.