Funeral Cost Statistics (2026)

A traditional funeral with a viewing and burial costs a median of $8,300 at a US funeral home, according to the National Funeral Directors Association's 2023 General Price List Study. That is the latest NFDA price study; it surveyed member funeral homes in July 2023, and 809 of the 5,219 it contacted responded. When a burial vault is added, the median total rises to $9,995.

A funeral with a viewing followed by cremation costs a median of $6,280. These are medians of the prices funeral homes list on their General Price Lists, so half of funeral homes charge more and half charge less. They describe what the funeral home bills and nothing else.

NFDA has not published a newer price study. Several funeral-home sites describe the same $8,300 figure as coming from a 2024 study; it comes from the 2023 study.

The NFDA median leaves out three groups of costs. The first is the cemetery: the plot or crypt, the charge to open and close the grave, and any perpetual care fee. The second is the monument or grave marker. The third is cash-advance items, which the funeral home pays to others on the family's behalf, such as flowers, obituary notices, clergy honoraria and death certificates.

The FTC's funeral pricing checklist lists each of those cemetery items as a separate charge to ask about, without giving prices. No federal agency publishes a national average price for a cemetery plot or headstone, so this page does not quote one. The closest government figure is the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, which found that US households spent an average of $14.29 on cemetery lots, vaults and maintenance fees in 2025, averaged across every household, including those with no death in the family.

Two items make up most of the bill. A metal burial casket has a median price of $2,500, unchanged since 2021, and the nondeclinable basic services fee is $2,459. The basic services fee is the one charge on the price list that families cannot decline.

Embalming has a median price of $845 and other preparation of the body, such as dressing and cosmetology, $295. Using the funeral home's facilities and staff costs $475 for a viewing and $550 for the ceremony. Moving the body to the funeral home costs $395, the hearse $375, a service car or van $175, and a basic printed memorial package $195. The vault, when bought from the funeral home, has a median price of $1,695.

The fastest-rising items between 2021 and 2023 were the service car or van (up 16.7%) and the transfer of remains (up 12.9%). The casket was the only item that did not rise.

The gap between the two NFDA medians is $2,020: $8,300 for a funeral with viewing and burial and $6,280 for a funeral with viewing and cremation. With a vault the burial figure becomes $9,995, about $3,700 more than the cremation figure. The cremation median includes a cremation fee, an alternative container and an urn, along with the viewing and ceremony (NFDA).

Cremation prices rose faster than burial prices over the two years: 8.1% against 5.8%. NFDA compared both with general inflation of 13.6% over the same period, which means the price of a funeral fell in real terms between 2021 and 2023.

A direct cremation, with no viewing or ceremony, leaves out the embalming, viewing and ceremony charges. NFDA does not publish a median for direct cremation, and neither does any federal agency, so the price of the simplest option is not available from a primary national source.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks funeral prices in the Consumer Price Index. The funeral expenses index rose 2.7% in the 12 months to September 2026, from 407.049 to 418.227, while all consumer prices rose 3.7%. In August 2026 the yearly increases were 3.0% for funerals and 3.4% for all items.

Funeral inflation has cooled since 2022. Calculated from December to December, the index rose 5.1% in 2022, 4.7% in 2023, 3.0% in 2024 and 2.6% in 2025. Over the last 10 years, from September 2016 to September 2026, funeral prices rose 30.3% and all prices rose 39.6%.

Over a longer period funeral prices have outpaced inflation. Since December 1986, when the index starts, funeral prices have risen 318%, against 205% for all items. BLS made the same point in 2017, reporting that funeral expenses had risen 227.1% from December 1986 to September 2017 while overall prices rose 123.4%.

The NFDA study and the BLS index measure different things, and they do not always move together. From December 2021 to December 2023 the BLS funeral index rose 10.1%, while NFDA's median of funeral home list prices rose 5.8% over roughly the same two years.

NFDA reports the median of the prices its member funeral homes list. The CPI follows the prices for a fixed set of funeral goods and services over time. For a single headline number on what a funeral costs, the NFDA median is the standard figure. For how fast that cost is changing, the CPI is the official measure.

NFDA projects that 63.4% of Americans who died in 2025 were cremated and 31.6% were buried, so cremation is now chosen about twice as often as burial (NFDA). NFDA's 2025 Cremation & Burial Report projects the cremation rate will reach 82.3% by 2045, with burial falling to 13.0%.

The Cremation Association of North America puts the national rate at 60.6% in 2023, with six states above 80%. CANA reports that the rate passed 50% for the first time in 2016 and was about 5% in 1972, and that it grew by 1 to 2 percentage points a year between those dates. CANA projects cremation will be the most common choice in every state by 2033.

At the median, a cremation funeral costs about $2,000 less than a burial funeral and avoids most cemetery charges. Preferences are also changing: in its 2025 consumer study, 61.4% of people said they were interested in green funeral options, up from 55.7% in 2021.

The Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule, in force since April 30, 1984 and revised in 1994, sets out what funeral homes must tell buyers about prices (FTC). Anyone who asks in person must be given a General Price List, which must itemize 16 required items and carry six disclosures. Funeral homes must also show separate price lists for caskets and outer burial containers.

Funeral homes must give accurate prices over the phone and cannot require callers to give their name, address or phone number. Buyers can choose individual goods and services instead of a package, and they can supply their own casket or urn; the funeral home cannot charge a fee for handling a casket bought elsewhere. The price list must state that embalming is not required by law except in certain special cases, and that an alternative container can be used for a direct cremation.

At the end of the arrangements, the funeral home must give an itemized written statement of everything selected and its price. Violations carry civil penalties of up to $53,088 each.

In its first undercover phone sweep, FTC staff called more than 250 funeral homes during 2023 and sent warning letters to 39 of them, announced in January 2024. In 38 of those cases the funeral home refused to give prices over the phone or gave inconsistent prices. One home falsely said embalming was required by law, and one sent package prices instead of an itemized price list.

An earlier round of undercover in-person inspections, run from 2018 and reported in June 2020, found that 17 of 90 funeral homes did not hand over itemized prices when required. The failure rate varied by place: 7 of 13 homes inspected around Marietta and Gainesville, Georgia, 4 of 23 in Beaumont, Texas, 3 of 23 in Las Vegas, 3 of 20 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and none of 11 in northern and central New Jersey.

The Funeral Rule requires prices in person and by phone but not on a website. In October 2022 the FTC voted 4-0 to keep the rule and to seek comment on requiring online price disclosure. An FTC staff review found that fewer than 40% of funeral provider websites it examined posted any prices, and more than 60% of funeral home websites gave little to no information about prices. The FTC had not issued a proposed rule on online prices as of November 2026.

Most buyers say they want prices online. In NFDA's 2026 Consumer Awareness and Preferences Study, an industry survey, 82.4% said they were more likely to use a funeral home that posts its General Price List online, and 66.4% said they visit funeral home websites to review options and pricing. Of those who had received a price list, 65.7% found it easy to understand, while 57.2% still relied on talking to someone in person to make sense of the final cost.

Social Security pays a one-time lump-sum death payment of $255 to a surviving spouse who lived in the same household, or to an eligible child (20 CFR 404.390). The Social Security Amendments of 1954 capped it at $255 and it has not changed since. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average payment in 1954 was $208, worth more than $2,042 in 2021 dollars. In 2020 Social Security paid about $226 million in these benefits for 877,943 deaths. At $255, the payment covers about 3% of an $8,300 funeral.

The Department of Veterans Affairs pays a burial allowance of $1,032 and a plot allowance of $1,032 for eligible veterans who die on or after October 1, 2026, up from $1,002 each a year earlier and $978 each the year before. For a service-connected death on or after September 11, 2001, the VA pays up to $2,000 toward burial.

FEMA's COVID-19 funeral assistance program, now closed, received more than 609,000 applications and approved more than 506,000, paying about $3.26 billion for more than 512,000 people who died of COVID-19 (FEMA, data as of February 19, 2026). That works out to roughly $6,440 per approved application, a Walnut calculation from FEMA's totals.

Final expense life insurance, small whole-life policies sold to cover a funeral, is growing quickly. In an industry survey of 30 carriers by LIMRA and the Life Insurers Council, new annualized final expense premium rose 32% in 2025 to $1.38 billion, on about 1.3 million policies (LIMRA and LIC). Simplified-issue policies made up 76% of sales with an average face amount of $15,344, and guaranteed-issue policies, which require no health questions, made up 24% at an average of $11,299.

Both average face amounts are larger than the $9,995 median for a funeral with burial and vault, leaving room for cemetery costs. Three quarters of final expense policies (75%) were sold through independent agents, 20% through affiliated agents and 5% directly to consumers.

No federal survey reports how many Americans have prepaid a funeral or how many families borrow to pay for one, so this page does not estimate either figure.

The BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey puts average spending on funeral expenses at $80.41 per household in 2025, plus $14.29 on cemetery lots, vaults and maintenance fees. These are averages across all 137,994,000 US households, most of which had no funeral to pay for that year, so they describe the national total spread thin, not the cost of one funeral.

Multiplied across every household, the survey implies roughly $11 billion of household spending on funerals a year and about $2 billion on cemetery costs. Those are Walnut calculations from the BLS mean, and the survey's standard errors on these small categories are large.

The CDC counted 3,072,666 deaths in the US in 2024, 18,298 fewer than in 2023, which sets the size of the market each year. NFDA counts 15,401 funeral homes operating in the US, about 75% of them family or privately owned, employing 105,300 people and taking in $16.3 billion in revenue, plus $4.274 billion at crematories and cemeteries (NFDA).

Federal employment data gives a slightly smaller count. The BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages found 13,777 funeral home establishments with employees in 2024, down 115 from 2023, employing 103,292 people at an average annual pay of $48,200. There were 4,423 private cemetery and crematory establishments with 31,346 jobs, plus 713 run by local governments.

The Green Burial Council estimates there are 470 green burial cemeteries in the US and Canada. Green burial skips embalming, the vault and a metal casket, which leaves out three NFDA median line items worth $5,040 together (the $2,500 casket, the $1,695 vault and the $845 embalming), a Walnut calculation.

The council cites research by Cornell's Woodsen estimating what conventional US burials put into the ground between 2014 and 2019: 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 64,500 tons of steel and 20 million board feet of hardwood.

A funeral is one of the larger bills a family pays on short notice, with NFDA medians of $6,280 to $9,995 at the funeral home alone before cemetery costs, and government help covers little of it outside the VA. The FTC rules give buyers a right to itemized prices, by phone and in person, which makes comparing two or three funeral homes practical.

For people who keep savings in a brokerage account, Walnut, an AI investing app, can read a connected account and show how that money is doing. The statistics on this page describe what funerals cost; they are not a recommendation on what anyone should spend or buy.