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 We do not publish a median funeral cost on this page, and the reason is in the sourcing section — it is not an oversight.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, 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. 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: 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. 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, up from 55.7% in 2021. Relevant to cost because green options mostly remove line items (embalming, vault, metal casket) rather than adding them.
Why there is no median cost on this page
NFDA does publish median funeral costs — through its General Price List study, which is not posted on its public statistics page. We read that page on 2026-08-04 and it carries rates, industry scale and consumer-preference figures and no cost medians; three candidate NFDA cost URLs returned 404.
So the honest position is: the median exists, we did not read it, and we are not reproducing a figure at second hand. Almost every “average funeral cost” article you will find cites a number it copied from another article that copied it from a press release, usually without the year and always without saying whether it includes the cemetery plot, the vault, or the headstone — which between them can exceed the funeral home’s own bill. If you need the median for a piece, get it from NFDA directly and state the edition year.
What you can price exactly, today, is your own quote. The FTC Funeral Rule gives you the right to an itemised price list before you agree to anything — see your rights under the Funeral Rule. An itemised list from two homes in your own town beats any national average ever published.
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. 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.