Editorial standards

What we are

Burial Estimator is an estimating tool run by Raphael Hertz, a licensed life insurance agent. We are not a funeral home, a cemetery, a funeral director or an insurance company. We do not sell funerals and we cannot quote you a price on one.

Where the numbers come from

Funeral home figures are drawn from the National Funeral Directors Association General Price List Survey, which is the only large scale published pricing survey in this industry. The NFDA reports by US Census division rather than by state, so on its own it would give every state in a division the same number, and all nine South Atlantic states would read identically.

We do not think that is good enough, so we keep the NFDA survey for the level and use the basic services fees that funeral homes in each state publish themselves to spread it across the states inside each division. Each state is scaled against the measured fees of its own division, which leaves the division centred on the median the survey measured while letting Florida and Georgia differ, as they plainly do in reality. Service charges use the services parity, manufactured goods like a casket or a headstone use the goods parity, and the cemetery plot uses the housing parity as the closest published proxy for land value.

This is an adjustment rather than a survey, and it is stated on every page that uses it. It gives a better estimate than one divisional figure repeated nine times. It is still an estimate.

Cemetery costs are not in the NFDA survey at all. Plots, opening and closing the grave, vaults and headstones are set independently by each cemetery and vary more than any other line on the bill. The figures we use are typical national mid-points, and we label them as such rather than presenting them as precise.

How often it is reviewed

Cost pages are reviewed when the NFDA publishes a new survey, and at least annually otherwise. Each guide carries the date it was last reviewed at the foot of the article.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong we would rather hear about it than not. Call (786) 818-0383 and it gets fixed. Material corrections are noted on the page rather than quietly edited out.

How we make money, and how that is kept separate

We earn a commission from an insurance carrier if you buy a policy through us. We earn nothing from the calculator, and nothing from the guides. There is no email gate and no lead form, because a page that holds the answer hostage is not worth reading.

Carrier comparison content is editorial. We write about companies we do not represent, and we say so on the page. Only the carriers listed in our appointment list are ones we can actually place business with.