Updated August 4, 2026. Quick answer: the single biggest force on what American families spend on a funeral is not inflation — it is the shift to cremation. The National Funeral Directors Association projects a 63.4% cremation rate for 2025 against 31.6% burial, reaching 82.3% by 2045. Every figure below is quoted from NFDA and attributed to them. We do not publish a median funeral cost on this page, and the reason is in the sourcing section — it is not an oversight.
Headline statistics
63.4% — projected US cremation rate, 2025.
NFDA’s projected 2025 rate, from its 2025 Cremation & Burial Report, against a projected 31.6% burial rate. The two have swapped places within one generation, and cremation is the cheaper disposition in almost every market — which is why national average-cost series can fall even when every individual line item is rising.
82.3% — cremation rate expected by 2045.
NFDA’s projection, from the same 2025 Cremation & Burial Report. Anyone modelling funeral cost two decades out is modelling a different product mix, not the same funeral at a higher price.
15,401 — funeral homes operating in the United States.
NFDA, which publishes this figure with no data year attached — we are not inventing one. Approximately 75% are family- or privately owned, employing 105,300 people. That ownership structure is why price varies so much between two homes in the same town — there is no national price list.
$16.3 billion — annual revenue, US funeral homes.
NFDA, with a further $4.274 billion generated by crematories and cemeteries. Like the funeral-home count above, NFDA attaches no data year to this figure, so neither do we. Divided across roughly 15,401 homes this is a small-business industry, not a concentrated one.
61.4% — consumers interested in green funeral options.
NFDA’s 2025 Consumer Awareness and Preferences Report, up from 55.7% in 2021. Relevant to cost because green options mostly remove line items (embalming, vault, metal casket) rather than adding them.
The median exists, and here is what it actually covers
An earlier version of this page said we had not read NFDA’s General Price List study and would not reproduce its figure at second hand. We have now read it at the source. From the 2023 NFDA Member General Price List Study, December 08, 2023: “the median cost of a funeral with casket and burial has increased only 5.8% over the past two years (from $7,848 to $8,300) and the median cost of a funeral with cremation, including alternative cremation casket and urn, has increased 8.1% over the past two years (from $5,810 to $6,280).”
The caution behind the old wording still stands, and the study itself is why. NFDA builds that median from 10 funeral-home line items and states that “The cost does not take into account cemetery, monument or marker costs or miscellaneous cash-advance charges, such as for flowers or an obituary.” The cemetery plot, the marker and the vault are outside the number, and between them they can rival the funeral home’s own bill. Quoting $8,300 as “the cost of a funeral” is therefore wrong in the direction that matters to a family.
NFDA’s releases also give two different cremation medians for the same year — $6,970 in the 2021 release, $5,810 in the 2023 release’s restated base — because the basket was redefined between editions. We work through the figure, the 10-item basket, the exclusions and that series break in how much a funeral costs.
Who actually pays
The cost question people are usually asking is not “what is the average” but “who pays for this, and when”. Those are separate and both are answerable:
- Who is legally responsible for the bill — and why the person who signs is not always the estate.
- How funeral costs rank against other claims when the estate is settled, which decides whether they get paid at all.
- Paying without life insurance, where the money has to be available in days, not weeks.
- Whether prepaying is worth it — a question with a Medicaid dimension most sales conversations skip.
- Veterans’ burial benefits, which are routinely left unclaimed.
Cite this data
The rate, scale and preference figures above are NFDA’s and should be cited to NFDA. This page’s framing — the product-mix point, and the caution about second-hand medians — is ours and free to reuse with a link.
Suggested citation: “Funeral cost statistics,” Clear Money Guide, 2026, clearmoneyguide.com/funeral-cost-statistics/, citing National Funeral Directors Association statistics.
Source and method
Figures read from NFDA’s statistics page on 2026-08-04 and re-read there on 2026-08-13, when every figure above was unchanged. Where NFDA states the report a figure comes from, that report is now named beside the figure; where NFDA publishes no data year, the figure says so rather than borrowing one. The 2025 rates are NFDA projections, labelled as such by NFDA and labelled as such here. Our own statute-cited estate data, including what probate costs the estate the funeral is billed against, is at probate cost statistics and the datasets page. Method: methodology. Mistakes: corrections. Index: statistics.
Also on funeral decisions: whether embalming is required by law — what the law actually requires, and what the funeral home merely prefers.