Why Do Funerals Cost So Much?

$2,495. That's the median charge on an American funeral bill in 2023 for something you never see and never take home. It's called the basic services fee, and it's the one line you're not allowed to decline. That line exists because of a woman who once telephoned a string of undertakers with a story about an aunt who had just died. She didn't have an aunt. She had a suspicion. And what those undertakers told her on the phone, every single one of them, turned out to be untrue. Ask most people why funerals cost what they cost, and you get the same answer. The things are expensive. Steel and hardwood caskets, embalming, two cemetery workers and a small excavator, a building with a chapel and a parking lot that sits empty five days a week. All of that is true. None of it explains the bill. Start with the number you just heard. The basic services fee isn't a casket, a hearse, or a grave. It's the funeral director's hours, the paperwork, the permits, and a slice of the buildings overhead. It is the single charge federal law allows a funeral home to make non-refusable. Everything else on the list you can legally say no to. Embalming isn't required by law in most situations. A casket isn't required for cremation at all. You can buy one from a discount retailer, have it shipped, and federal law says the funeral home must accept it and cannot charge you a handling fee for the trouble. Turn down every one of those, though you still haven't touched the charge you opened with. The basic services fee doesn't move. It isn't attached to any of it. Here's the scale we're talking about. In 2023, the median American funeral with a viewing and a burial came to $8,300, according to the funeral director's own trade association. And that figure stops at the funeral home's front door. No grave, no vault, no headstone, no flowers, no obituary. The cemetery sends a separate bill. If that total were really the cost of steel and formaldehyde and wages, two funeral homes on opposite sides of the same city would charge roughly the same for it. They don't. Consumer groups and undercover shoppers have repeatedly found identical services priced several times higher at one home than at another a short drive away. Same city, same Eskasket supplier, same labor market. Whatever is setting that price, it isn't the steel, which brings us back to the woman on the telephone. Her name was Jessica Mitford, English, sharp elbowed, married to a lawyer who handled death benefits for labor unions. His work got him curious about where all that benefit money ended up, and he pushed her to go and look. What she found in 1963 was that the American funeral had exactly one price, and that price was attached to one object. You walked into a room full of caskets. You chose a casket, and the casket's price was the price of your funeral. The staff, the hearse, the chapel, the director's time, all of it was folded invisibly into that one number, which meant the entire business of selling a funeral was the business of walking a grieving person into a room and steering them to the right shelf. Mitford wrote about how those rooms were arranged right down to the expensive caskets being placed, where a right-handed person's eye naturally travels first, and the phone calls. She rang undertaker after undertaker with a story about an elderly aunt who had just died, asking for a straight cremation, no ceremony, no coffin. Every single one told her that cremation without a coffin was against the law in California. It wasn't. It never had been. The book came out in 1963 and sold enormously. 19 years later, in September of 1982, the Federal Trade Commission issued the funeral rule. It took full effect on the 30th of April, 1984, and it did one big thing. It made the bundle illegal. A funeral could no longer be sold as one take-it-or-leave-it price. Every item had to carry its own number printed on a list handed to you in writing before anyone said the word casket. But all that overhead that used to hide inside the casket price had to go somewhere. So the rule permitted exactly one charge a customer cannot refuse, the services of the funeral director and staff. In its own later filings, the FTC is blunt about where that came from. The fee grew out of the unbundling requirement itself. Before the rule, the commission wrote, everything was bundled into a single package and none of it could be declined. After the rule, one piece stayed non-declinable and everything else became a menu. So the itemized list, the fix, the great consumer victory, is the shape of the old bundled price, cracked open and laid out in rows, which would be fine if the list did the job it was built to do. The whole theory of the funeral rule is comparison. Put the prices in writing up front in the customer's hand and the customer will shop. That's how disclosure works in every other market. You see a price, you check another price. You decide. In 2022, Ipsos ran a survey for two consumer organizations and asked people who had actually helped arrange a funeral whether they'd collected price lists from more than one funeral home. One in five said yes. Four out of five had never walked into a second funeral home at all. Nobody buys a car that way. Most people won't buy a mattress that way and it isn't laziness. Look at what the room actually looks like. FTC staff went through nearly 200 funeral home websites across the country between June and September of 2021. Almost every one of them posted obituaries. Many offered a way to send flowers and a clear majority carried no price information whatsoever so comparing means physically driving to buildings and collecting paper in the two or three days after somebody died. One man described that to the FTC in writing. His four-year-old son died suddenly. He walked into a funeral home knowing none of its prices and by the time he sat down, the funeral home already had his son. He couldn't get up and go shopping. Almost nobody in that chair can. That's the answer. It was never the casket. It's the buyer. A funeral is the only large purchase most people make while grieving on a clock somebody else started with no second, as I quote, for a product they'll buy once or twice in a lifetime and never get any better at buying. There is no other counter in American retail where the customer can't leave, can't wait, can't compare, can't teet-bang with the orphanate and feeling like a statement about how much they loved the person who died and the itemized list sits right in the middle of that. It was designed as a shield. In practice, it's a Xenu handed to someone on the worst morning of their life where for every single line is an opportunity to decline something for their mother. Here's my opinion. The funeral rule is one of the best-constructed consumer protection trusts in the country and it is solving the wrong problem. It assumes people overpay because they don't know the priest is. That isn't why. They overpay because they are the one kind of buyer alive who cannot use even when it's printed and sitting in their hands. Disclosure law is written for a shopper. A funeral doesn't have a shopper. It has a mourner. Hand a mourner a perfect itemized federally mandated price list and what you have handed them is paperwork which leaves the strangest part of all this. Mitford won. Every price is itemized now in writing by federal law before the caskets come out. The transparency she spent two decades demanding is exactly what she asked for and the bill didn't fall. She did get the funeral she wanted. In 1996, her wife asked for Kramer for $475. No ceremony, ashes scattered at sea. Her entire funeral cost less than the metal casket alone on the median American bill in 2023 and she didn't buy a casket. When she died, funeral directors around the country rang her family offering their services. Her son remembered the offers as really fancy funerals. She was in the end about the only person the price list ever really worked for. Not because she was tougher than anyone else at that table because she read it decades early sitting at a desk at a time when nobody she loved was dead.