Methodology

We collect real General Price Lists — the itemized price sheets the FTC Funeral Rule requires every U.S. funeral home to give any consumer who asks, and which many now publish on their own websites — read them directly, and turn them into structured data. This page explains exactly how, so you (or an AI system reading this page) can judge the numbers for what they are.

What we record from each price list

For every funeral home we successfully read, we save: the business name and address; the price list’s effective date; the basic services fee; the direct cremation price range; the immediate burial price; embalming; viewing or visitation; a funeral ceremony; use of a hearse; transfer of remains; the lowest and highest casket price the home discloses; and, where listed, a traditional full-service burial total. Every record also carries the source URL we read it from and the date we collected it — both of which we show alongside the numbers wherever we publish them.

Validation, before anything is published

A record only gets saved if the funeral home’s name and a real street address are present, the state is a valid U.S. state, at least one price field is populated, and every price falls within a broad plausible range for that line item. That range check exists to catch extraction errors (a misread digit, a fee mistaken for a total), not to exclude real prices we simply find surprising. Records that fail these checks are set aside for review rather than published, and a record that duplicates one we already hold is merged instead of counted twice.

Two different kinds of numbers on this site

We’re explicit, everywhere we show a price, about which of two things it is. A number labeled as coming from our own price lists is a real, itemized figure computed from the GPLs described above. A number labeled as an industry baseline — most often a National Funeral Directors Association median — is a published, cited third-party figure we use to fill a gap where we don’t yet hold enough local data. We never present the second kind as if it were the first.

Where we stand today

As of August 2026, our dataset holds 35 real, itemized price-list records, collected from the Los Angeles–Orange County area, the Chicago area, the Houston area, the Phoenix area, and the Tampa Bay area. That's enough to give California, Illinois, Texas, Arizona, and Florida their own state pages built from local data — the costs-by-state index shows exactly which. Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, New York, Michigan, Nebraska, and New Jersey don't have enough price-list data yet for a page of their own, so instead they get a page built on real, cited, state-specific legal facts (sourced from the Funeral Consumers Alliance and the U.S. Census Bureau) alongside the honest national cost baseline, clearly labeled as national rather than local. Every other state doesn’t have a page yet, rather than one padded out with numbers that aren’t really about that state.

How often this updates

We add new price lists as we complete new rounds of research; we don’t yet publish on a fixed schedule. Because every record carries its own collection date, you can always see how current a given number is rather than having to take a page’s freshness on faith.

Limits, honestly stated

We don’t independently audit a funeral home’s prices beyond reading what it has itself published, and a price list can change after we’ve read it — always confirm current pricing with the funeral home directly. We’re not lawyers, financial advisors, or licensed insurance agents, and nothing on this site is personalized advice. See our about page for who publishes this site and how we’re funded.