What actually happens during egg freezing?

Egg freezing takes about two weeks from the first injection to collection. Daily hormone injections encourage a group of follicles to grow together. The mature eggs are then collected in a short day procedure under light sedation and flash frozen by vitrification, and stored until you need them.

Will I ever use my frozen eggs?

Whether someone will return to use their frozen eggs is very hard to predict, in large part because it is difficult to estimate a person's chance of conceiving naturally without actually trying. Egg freezing is primarily about keeping future reproductive options open. It is worth discussing your situation with a fertility specialist if you are not ready for children yet, are weighing career or life circumstances, have endometriosis or a family history of early menopause, or are planning fertility preservation before cancer treatment or ovarian surgery.

Is egg freezing covered by Medicare in Australia?

Planned (social) egg freezing is generally not Medicare-rebatable and is an out-of-pocket cost, with an annual storage fee. Egg freezing for a medical reason, such as before cancer treatment, may attract Medicare and PBS support. Exact costs are confirmed at consultation.

Egg Freezing in Melbourne | Dr Yuval Fouks, Fertility Specialist

Egg Freezing

What it is, how many eggs you actually need, and how often they get used. The honest version.

Egg freezing is one of the most important decisions you may make about your future family planning, often well before it feels relevant.

This page is designed to be a truly resourceful tool for you, built to support your empowerment, control, and knowledge throughout the process, from the initial consultation and fertility assessment through to stimulation planning, egg collection, and long-term storage advice.

The aim is to make the process clear, supportive, and medically tailored to your circumstances, whether you are considering egg freezing for personal, medical, or timing-related reasons.

You will be guided through each step with a focus on safety, your expectations, and helping you make an informed decision about your reproductive future.

MelodAi, in the lower right, is a smart virtual tool that can help with any questions you have along the way. It does not replace your care provider, and I am only a click away to support you through egg freezing.

These are the questions people actually ask, in the order they usually come up. Tap a card to flip it open.

Soft overlapping circles in pink and purple tones

Egg freezing pauses the clock on a set of your eggs at today's age, roughly two weeks, start to finish.

Initial consultation and fertility assessment
Approximately 10 to 12 days of hormone stimulation
Monitoring scans and blood tests
Egg collection under light sedation
Egg freezing using vitrification technology

Flexible startYou don't have to wait for a particular day of your cycle. With a random start, stimulation can begin at almost any point, useful when timing matters or you want to start right away.

Ovarian stimulation

Your cycle begins with hormone injections to stimulate the development of multiple follicles. Three types of medication are typically used: follicle-stimulating hormones, ovulation-suppressing medication, and a trigger injection. Monitoring ultrasounds guide the process throughout.
Egg collection

Egg collection is performed under sedation using transvaginal ultrasound aspiration. All up, this procedure takes around 20 to 30 minutes.
Egg assessment

Once collected, your eggs are examined by an embryologist to select the mature, healthy eggs that are suitable for freezing.
Vitrification

The suitable eggs are rapidly vitrified and stored in liquid nitrogen, where they can remain indefinitely until you're ready to use them.

The stimulation cycle

What happens, day by day

Egg freezing follows a short, carefully timed hormone cycle. Step through the days alongside a live follicular tracking scan.

Ovary · follicular tracking

Day 0

TV 7.5 MHz

baseline

Example follicular tracking scan (illustrative).

Day 0start

Stimulation begins

After a baseline scan and blood test, daily hormone injections (follicle stimulating hormone) start at home. They encourage a group of follicles to grow together, rather than the single follicle of a natural month.

Leading follicle≈ 5 mm

What you take, and when

Daily injectionsfollicle recruitment (FSH)

Antagonist or pillholds eggs back until trigger

Key momentstrigger, then collection

Day 0Trigger+36h

After collection

Step 1

Vitrification

Mature eggs are flash frozen within hours using vitrification, a rapid method that avoids ice crystal damage.

Step 2

Storage

Frozen eggs are held safely and do not age while frozen. They can be stored for years.

Step 3

Future use

When the time is right, eggs are thawed, fertilised with sperm by ICSI, and the embryo is transferred.

This illustrates a typical antagonist cycle for egg freezing. The scan shown is an example for illustration. Timing and protocols vary between people and clinics, and a plan is always tailored to the individual. The days shown are a guide, not a fixed schedule.

Iridescent translucent spheres on a pale background

Egg freezing is not only a numbers game, as it is often portrayed. Egg reserve and egg quality both move with age, so the count alone does not tell the whole story. Not every frozen egg will survive thawing, fertilise, develop into an embryo, or result in a live birth, so the total number of eggs frozen still matters. The likelihood of a future live birth generally increases as more eggs are stored.

Eggs to freeze for ~75% chance of at least one baby

At 34 about 10 mature eggs reach a roughly 75% chance of a baby; by 42 it takes around 61. Source: Goldman RH et al., Human Reproduction, 2017.

Same 20 eggs, different odds by age

With 20 eggs frozen, the chance of a baby falls from about 90% at 34 to 37% at 42. Source: Goldman RH et al., Human Reproduction, 2017.

A gentle note: these charts are model-based estimates and simulations, a rough guide to the trends, not a prediction for any one person. Your own outlook depends on many individual factors, and we work through what they mean for you together at your consultation.

This is why I encourage younger patients not to wait, and why I am cautious about over-promising to patients who start later.

Aerial view of a green field with yard markers twenty, thirty and forty

Age influences egg quality, so the earlier you freeze, the fewer eggs it tends to take to reach the same future chance, an encouraging reason not to wait. Around 34, about 10 mature eggs are associated with roughly a 75 percent chance of at least one baby; by 42 it can take closer to 61. Whatever your age, freezing now preserves options that time would otherwise narrow.

Estimate your own number. Pick your age:

Estimated cumulative chance of at least one live birth, by the number of mature eggs frozen. Whiskers show the 95% confidence interval, which is why a small dip between groups is normal in a real cohort. Source: Cobo A et al., Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2025 (n = 2,891, IVIRMA Spain and NYU Langone). For an estimate that also uses your AMH and antral follicle count, try the full calculator.

A halved pomegranate above almonds arranged with drawn tails

Whether someone will return to use their frozen eggs is very hard to predict, in large part because it is difficult to estimate a person's chance of conceiving naturally without actually trying. Egg freezing is primarily about keeping future reproductive options open. If any of the following apply to you, it is worth discussing your situation with a fertility specialist:

Not ready for children yet
Career or life circumstances
Endometriosis
Family history of early menopause
Before cancer treatment
Before ovarian surgery
Other fertility preservation indications

Return to use frozen eggs, by cohort

Follow-up time is the whole story here. Within the first few years return is low, but in a cohort followed 10 to 15 years, nearly 4 in 10 had come back. Pooled across planned egg-freezing studies, the average return rate is about 11.1% (Hirsch et al., Human Reproduction Update, 2024). Medical (cancer) freezing also behaves differently from social freezing. Sources: SART-CORS cohort, 2025; Blakemore & Grifo, Fertility and Sterility, 2021.

Who actually returns?

In follow-up work, our group built a model that predicts return from a handful of factors: age at freezing, whether you have a partner, ethnicity, location, and your reason for freezing. The model reached a balanced accuracy of 0.83. It is a step toward counselling each patient on her own likely path, rather than quoting a single national average.

Source: Fouks et al., Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2025 (machine learning return-rate model).

A lower egg yield does not mean the cycle was unsuccessful. In a national cohort, women who froze the fewest eggs returned to use them more often than strong responders did. Some women choose to undertake an additional cycle to increase the total number of eggs stored and improve cumulative future chances.

Does freezing a low number make return more likely?

In this national cohort, the women who froze the fewest eggs returned at nearly twice the rate of strong responders (4.0% vs 2.3%; adjusted odds ratio 1.52, P < 0.001). Source: Fouks et al., JAMA Network Open, 2024.

A caveat the numbers cannot capture: these rates count only women who came back to the clinic. Many who never returned will have conceived naturally, which no registry records. So the share of women who simply never needed their frozen eggs is almost certainly higher than any return rate suggests.

So is it worth freezing if the numbers are low? The data say something counterintuitive. Women who banked only a handful of eggs returned to use them more often than strong responders did, most likely because they had less in reserve to fall back on. A low yield is not a reason to walk away from the eggs you have. But it does change the conversation: as the age chart above shows, the chance of a live birth still rises with the number of eggs, so a low count usually means setting realistic expectations and often planning a second cycle, rather than relying on one.

A young oak seedling sprouting from an acorn in a glass vase

Egg freezing may be worth considering if you are not ready for children yet, face medical treatment that can affect fertility, or have a condition that may reduce ovarian reserve.

Not ready for children yet

Career or life circumstances

Endometriosis

Family history of early menopause

Before cancer treatment

Before ovarian surgery

Other fertility preservation indications

Meet Dr Yuval Fouks

Dr Yuval Fouks is a fertility specialist at Melbourne IVF and The Royal Women's Hospital. He combines clinical expertise with research experience from leading international fertility centres, including Harvard University and Boston IVF.

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References

Goldman RH, Racowsky C, Farland LV, Munné S, Ribustello L, Fox JH. Predicting the likelihood of live birth for elective oocyte cryopreservation: a counseling tool for physicians and patients. Hum Reprod. 2017;32(4):853-859. doi:10.1093/humrep/dex008

Cobo A, García-Velasco JA, Coello A, et al. Oocyte vitrification as an efficient option for elective fertility preservation. Fertil Steril. 2016;105(3):755-764. doi:10.1016/j.fertnstert.2015.11.027

Fouks Y, Sakkas D, Bortoletto PE, Penzias AS, Seidler EA, Vaughan DA. Utilization of cryopreserved oocytes in patients with poor ovarian response after planned oocyte cryopreservation. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(1):e2349722. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.49722

Fouks Y, Bortoletto P, Chang J, Penzias A, Vaughan D, Sakkas D. Looking into the future: a machine learning powered prediction model for oocyte return rates after cryopreservation. Reprod Biomed Online. 2024;50(1):104432. doi:10.1016/j.rbmo.2024.104432

Meyers AJ, Fouks Y, Bortoletto P, Penzias AS, Sakkas D, Vaughan DA. Low return to care rates amongst women who underwent oocyte cryopreservation for oncological indications: a SART data analysis. Fertil Steril. 2025;125(3):527-529. doi:10.1016/j.fertnstert.2025.09.038

Blakemore JK, Grifo JA, DeVore SM, Hodes-Wertz B, Berkeley AS. Planned oocyte cryopreservation 10-15-year follow-up: return rates and cycle outcomes. Fertil Steril. 2021;115(6):1511-1520. doi:10.1016/j.fertnstert.2021.01.011

Hirsch A, Hirsh Raccah B, Rotem R, Hyman JH, Ben-Ami I, Tsafrir A. Planned oocyte cryopreservation: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis. Hum Reprod Update. 2024;30(5):558-568. doi:10.1093/humupd/dmae009

Lee MB, et al. Elective fertility preservation: a national database study on trends in oocyte cryopreservation and oocyte utilization over a 5- to 7-year follow-up period. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2025.

Egg Freezing in Melbourne

Egg Freezing

Ovarian stimulation

Egg collection

Egg assessment

Vitrification

What happens, day by day

Stimulation begins

Vitrification

Storage

Future use

Who actually returns?

Meet Dr Yuval Fouks

Selected work by Dr Fouks

Utilization of cryopreserved oocytes in patients with poor ovarian response after planned oocyte cryopreservation

A machine-learning prediction model for oocyte return rates after cryopreservation

Low return-to-care rates among women who froze eggs for oncological indications

Fertility preservation in endometriosis: does patient symptomatology affect the ovarian response?

Fertility preservation and PGT-M in women with FAP-associated desmoid tumours

In-vitro maturation of oocytes recovered during fertility preservation in pre-pubertal girls

The elusive promise of egg freezing

References

Considering Egg Freezing?