The same cremation costs twice as much across town

Key findings

• Across 1,128 US cities holding three or more priced funeral homes, the median ratio between the dearest and cheapest direct cremation is 1.94x, a median gap of $1,220.
• In 48% of cities the dearest home charges at least double the cheapest. In 19% it is at least triple, and in 43 cities it is five times or more.
• Ringing three funeral homes instead of one is worth a median $489, and the FTC Funeral Rule already obliges every one of them to quote you over the telephone without you giving a name.
• The widest spread we measured is New York, NY, where Manhattan Funeral Service LLC records $445 and Frank E Campbell the Funeral Chapel records $9,300 across 33 homes, a factor of 20.9.
• The national median direct cremation in our data is $1,995, against the NFDA national figure of $2,202.

The same service, twice the price

A direct cremation is the most standardised thing a funeral home sells. No viewing, no ceremony, no casket, no procession. The body is collected, the paperwork is filed, the cremation happens and the ashes are returned. Two funeral homes performing it are doing very nearly the same work.

They are not charging the same for it. In half of all American cities the dearest funeral home charges at least 1.94 times what the cheapest does, and a family that rings the wrong one first pays $1,220 more than they needed to. That gap is 61% of the median price itself, for a service with no meaningful difference between providers.

This is invisible to every national and state average published about funeral costs, including ours, because averaging is exactly the operation that destroys it.

What three phone calls are worth

The useful version of this finding is not the spread, it is what a family can do about it this afternoon. So we computed it directly. For every city, the expected price of ringing one funeral home at random, against the expected price of ringing three and taking the cheapest.

Nothing stands between a family and that saving except knowing to ask. The FTC Funeral Rule has required funeral homes to disclose prices over the telephone since 1984, to anyone who asks, without giving a name or a reason. Most people do not know it, and the homes charging at the top of the range are not going to mention it.

The twelve widest cities

Cities holding at least eight priced funeral homes, so the spread is not an artefact of three data points. The named homes are the cheapest and dearest we hold in each.

By state

States holding at least five qualifying cities, widest median spread first. This is the median across that state’s cities, not the spread across the state as a whole, which would conflate a price difference with a distance.

Methodology

The sample. 12,242 US funeral homes for which we hold a direct cremation price, of which 6,186 sit in one of the 1,128 cities holding three or more. Cities with fewer than three are excluded because two prices are a pair, not a spread.

The sources, and why they check each other. Prices come from three places that did not consult one another: price surveys run by Funeral Consumers Alliance affiliates, the Parting funeral home directory, and general price lists published by the funeral homes themselves under the FTC Funeral Rule. Across all three, the median ratio of a home’s basic services fee to its direct cremation price falls between 0.91 and 1.00. Three independent sources agreeing that closely on the internal shape of a funeral bill is the strongest validation available without a survey of our own.

What was removed. A direct cremation cannot cost a fraction of the home’s own basic services fee, because that fee is non-declinable and every package contains it. A figure far below it is a component line that was parsed as though it were the package. One North Carolina home published $295 against its own $1,595 basic services fee, which is the crematory’s charge rather than anything a family was quoted. Records where the basic services fee exceeds the direct cremation by more than a factor of three are excluded, which is 0.5% of the data. A tighter rule would delete genuine package discounting, which is real and common.

The three calls figure. Computed exactly, not simulated. For a city with n priced homes, the probability that the cheapest of a randomly chosen three is the i-th cheapest overall is C(n−1−i, 2) divided by C(n, 3). The expected minimum is summed over every home, and subtracted from the mean price. The reported number is the median of that across all 1,128 cities.

Reproducing it. The computation is scripts/mkspread.py reading the directory that powers our funeral home listings. Every price on this site is shown with its source and its date on that home’s own page.

What this study cannot tell you

• These are recorded prices, not quotes. Only 9% carry a publication date from their own source. The rest are figures we recorded in September 2026 and label as such. Some survey prices are years old. Ring the home.
• Coverage is uneven and skews to homes that publish. A home that posts its price list is more likely to be in this sample, and homes that publish may compete differently from homes that do not. If anything that biases the measured spread downward.
• City boundaries are the ones in the source records. A metropolitan area split across several named cities is measured as several cities, which understates the spread a family could actually reach by driving.
• Cheapest is not best. This measures price for a standardised service. It says nothing about how any of these homes treat a family, and a direct cremation is deliberately the service where that matters least.

Common questions

Citing this study

Free to quote and republish with attribution and a link. Suggested citation:

Burial Estimator, “The same cremation costs twice as much across town”, September 2026. Analysis of direct cremation prices at 12,242 US funeral homes in 1,128 cities. https://burialestimator.com/research/cremation-price-spread

Journalists and researchers are welcome to a state or metro level cut of this data that is not published here. There is no charge and no conditions beyond attribution.