How this is made

We take no money to influence what families see. No referral fees, no ads, no featured placement.

Funeral homes can buy market analytics from us. That's the whole business model. It never changes what a family is shown here. Nobody can pay to appear, to rank, to be left out, or to have a figure softened. Saying so plainly is worth more to a family than any of that money would be.

Where a figure comes from

Every price here is read off a funeral home's own general price list, the document the Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule requires them to hand you. We collect those documents honestly. Our crawler identifies itself by name, we obey robots.txt, and a site that refuses us is recorded as refusing us rather than worked around. Where a document can be collected only by a person in a browser, a person collects it.

The document is read line by line into services and figures. A licensed funeral professional then reads those assembled figures against the home's own document, and nothing is published until he has. A number nobody has checked is worth less than no number at all.

What we publish, and what stays internal

Per home, per service, this is the whole of what a family sees. One ballpark, always rounded up so it never sits below what the home posts. One sentence saying what is inside that figure and what is not. The date the list was posted and the date we checked it. One link to the price list itself. And sales tax always described as approximate, with a plain instruction to ask the funeral home.

The exact assembled totals, the line by line math, and the review flags stay internal. A ballpark invites a question. A precise total pretends to be a quote, and only the funeral home can quote you.

A burial figure on a price list buys the funeral home's services and never the casket. Wherever a burial figure appears here, it says so in the same plain sentence. Where a home prices an immediate burial with its own least expensive casket inside the total, that figure carries its own sentence saying so, because the blanket sentence would be false of it.

What we refuse to do

We never invent a number. An unknown rate, an unverified fee, an unpriced item: the page names the gap in plain words instead of filling it. A state is shaded on the map only once 3 reviewed price lists in it post the service, because a median one document can move isn't a median. And a price list that prices a method its own state's law doesn't allow is pricing a trip out of state and back. It's never shown here as a local service.

Where the work stands

By the state rosters, 22,992 funeral homes are operating today, and we hold a price list collected from 4,543 of them. 5,471 of those documents read cleanly end to end. 2,355 homes are published, in 50 states and the District of Columbia. These counts are recomputed from the collection itself, not typed by hand. And they count funeral homes: a home whose website carries several pricing pages is one home here, not several.

Corrections

Documents go out of date and readers catch things. Tell us if a figure looks wrong, or send us a price list we are missing. Every message is read by a person.