How to Choose and Compare Funeral Homes: Services, Prices, and Trust Checks

Consumer groups that collect funeral home price lists have found differences of up to 400 to 500 percent for the same services.^[1] Federal law gives you what you need to compare: every funeral home has to quote prices over the phone and hand you an itemized price list.^[2] Few families shop around.

In a May 2022 Ipsos survey cited by the Funeral Consumers Alliance and the Consumer Federation of America, 20 percent of the 1,146 people who had helped plan a funeral said they’d visited more than one funeral home to get price lists.^[1]

Here’s how to compare funeral homes in an afternoon, on the phone, before anyone signs anything.

Because the price of the same thing moves a lot from one business to the next. The National Funeral Directors Association’s most recent price study put the national median for a funeral with viewing and burial at $8,300, and for a funeral with viewing and cremation at $6,280.^[3] Neither figure includes the cemetery, a grave marker, or cash advance items such as flowers or an obituary.^[3]

Direct cremation shows the spread most clearly, because the service is close to identical everywhere.^[5] US Funerals Online, citing Funeralocity’s 2026 price data, puts the national average at $2,202, with state averages from $1,264 in Oregon to $3,183 in North Dakota. Data from its sister cremation network shows the same direct cremation can differ by more than $2,000 within one city.^[4]

A funeral home sells services and goods, and the Funeral Rule makes it list both on its General Price List. Read the list and you’ll see what the funeral home does.^[2]

• Basic services of the funeral director and staff. The arrangements conference, planning the funeral, getting the permits, and placing obituary notices, plus the funeral home’s overhead. This is the one fee a funeral home can make non-declinable.^[2]
• Moving the body. Transfer of the body to the funeral home, and forwarding a body to or receiving one from another funeral home.^[2]
• Care of the body. Embalming, and other preparation such as dressing, grooming and cosmetology.^[2][3]
• Facilities and staff. For a viewing, a funeral ceremony or a memorial service, and equipment and staff for a graveside service.^[2]
• Vehicles. A hearse and a limousine.^[2]
• Simple arrangements. Direct cremation and immediate burial, each listed with a price range if the funeral home offers them.^[2]
• Goods. Caskets and outer burial containers, priced on their own lists or in full on the General Price List.^[2]

Funeral homes also arrange things they buy from someone else on your behalf, such as flowers, the obituary or a clergy honorarium. Those are cash advance items, and the written statement you get has to list them.^[2]

A quote only means something next to a quote for the same arrangement. Pick one before you call:

• Direct cremation. Cremation without a viewing or a ceremony with the body present.
• Immediate burial. Burial without a viewing or ceremony first.
• Cremation with a viewing and service.
• Burial with a viewing and service.

The first two are easy to compare because the Funeral Rule makes every funeral home that offers them print their prices on its General Price List.^[2] For the other two, write down the pieces you want (viewing, ceremony, hearse, casket) and ask each home to price the same pieces.

Four ways, from fastest to slowest:

• Check the website. Federal law doesn’t require online prices. California requires online posting, though some homes there use a loophole in the law to avoid it.^[1] When the Consumer Federation of America and the Funeral Consumers Alliance checked 1,046 funeral home websites in 35 state capitals in 2022, 191 of them, 18 percent, posted their price lists.^[1]
• Call. A funeral home has to tell anyone who asks by phone accurate information from its price lists.^[2] You don’t need an appointment.
• Visit. When you ask in person about arrangements or prices, the funeral home has to give you its General Price List to keep.^[2] Take it home.
• Look for a local price survey. Funeral Consumers Alliance affiliates publish price surveys built from funeral homes’ General Price Lists. The alliance lists surveys covering all or part of 18 states and Washington, D.C., with statewide surveys in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, Utah and Washington.^[5]

Every General Price List itemizes the same categories, because the Funeral Rule names them.^[2] Line the lists up side by side and compare each row. The national medians below come from the NFDA’s 2023 study.^[3]

NFDA’s burial table prints the basic services fee as $2,459. The cremation table prints $2,495 with the same 8.5 percent change from 2021, and the burial items add up to the $8,300 median only with $2,495, so this guide uses $2,495.^[3]

The basic services fee is the only charge the Funeral Rule lets a funeral home make non-declinable.^[2] Every other line is optional unless a law, your cemetery or the crematory requires it, and the funeral home has to explain any such requirement in writing.^[2] So compare two totals for each home: the total for exactly what you want, and the basic services fee alone. The second number tells you what the home charges before you buy anything.

Price is half of the decision. The other half is who will have custody of the body.

• The license. Look the funeral home up with your state’s funeral licensing board or the agency that registers funeral establishments. The agency’s name varies by state. Confirm the license is active and ask whether there’s any disciplinary record.
• Who owns it. In 2022, Service Corporation International, which owns the Dignity Memorial brand, controlled about 10 percent of the roughly 19,000 funeral homes in the U.S., and none of the 102 Dignity Memorial homes in the consumer groups’ website review posted prices online.^[1] Ask who owns the business before you sign.
• Who does the work. Ask where the body will be kept, whether the crematory is the funeral home’s own or a third party’s, and how the body’s identity is tracked from pickup to the return of the remains.

• What’s your total price for [the arrangement you picked], and what does it include?
• What is your basic services fee?
• What cash advance items should I expect, such as death certificates and an obituary, and what are your estimates for them?
• Do you require embalming for a viewing, and is embalming required by law for what I’m planning?
• If I buy a casket or urn somewhere else, will you charge anything to use it?
• Is your crematory on site? If not, whose is it?
• When is payment due, and will I get an itemized written statement before I pay?

Write the answers next to each home’s name. The written statement is required: at the end of the arrangement conference, the funeral home has to give you an itemized statement of every good and service you chose and its price.^[2]

Each of these breaks the Funeral Rule:^[2]

• Refusing to give prices over the phone, or refusing to give you the General Price List when you ask in person.
• Saying a casket is required for direct cremation, or not offering an alternative container.
• Embalming for a fee without your approval when no law required it.
• Making you buy one item to get another, or charging fees beyond the basic services fee, what you chose, and what a law, cemetery or crematory requires and the home explains in writing.

If you run into one, call the next funeral home on your list, and report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and to your state’s funeral board.

MORTL’s funeral home directory lists funeral homes by state after checking each one’s phone and address against its own website. A listing isn’t an endorsement, and MORTL doesn’t check funeral home licenses, so do that step yourself. The free funeral cost planner prices the same lines a General Price List does, so you can see what a fair total looks like before you call. For the full cost picture, read how much a funeral costs in 2026, and for every right the Funeral Rule gives you, read the Funeral Rule guide.