How Much Does a Funeral Cost? The NFDA Median, and the Three Costs It Leaves Out

Updated August 18, 2026. Quick answer: the most recent median NFDA publishes is $8,300 for a funeral with casket and burial and $6,280 for a funeral with cremation, from its 2023 General Price List Study. Both are a funeral home’s 10 line items and nothing else: the cemetery plot, the outer burial container and the grave marker sit outside the figure by NFDA’s own definition.

Nearly every article that answers this question quotes one number, drops the year, and never says what the number covers. The number is real and it comes from one place — the National Funeral Directors Association’s Member General Price List Study. This page gives you the figure, the edition it belongs to, the ten items NFDA adds up to get it, and the three large costs it deliberately leaves out.

The number, and the year it belongs to

From the 2023 NFDA Member General Price List Study, announced December 08, 2023, in NFDA’s own words:

“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).”

So the headline figures are $8,300 for a funeral with casket and burial and $6,280 for a funeral with cremation. NFDA’s point in publishing them was a comparison, not a shock: it put general inflation over the same two years at 13.6%, ahead of both increases.

Two things to carry with you. First, that is a 2023 edition — if you see $8,300 quoted as this year’s figure with no year attached, the writer copied it without checking. Second, it is a median of what NFDA member funeral homes charge on their price lists, not a survey of what families were billed.

The ten items NFDA adds up

The median is not a market average; it is a defined basket, and NFDA states the recipe:

“Since the 1960s, NFDA has calculated the median cost of a funeral with burial by totaling the costs of the following items: basic services fee, removal/transfer of remains to funeral home, embalming and other preparation of the body (casketing, cosmetology, dressing and grooming), a metal casket, use of facilities and staff for viewing and a funeral ceremony, use of a hearse, use of a service car/van, and a basic memorial printed package (e.g., memorial cards, register book, etc.).”

That is 10 line items, and every one of them is a charge from the funeral home. Which brings the important part.

What the median leaves out — and it is not small

In the same release, immediately after the recipe:

“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 grave marker or headstone, and the cash advances are not in the number. Neither is the outer burial container: NFDA lists the vault separately, and in its own itemized table the vault takes the 2019 total from $7,640 to $9,135. For cremation there is a parallel exclusion:

“The median cost does not include a cremation casket or container, which is generally required to ensure safe and respectful handling of the decedent’s body.”

The honest way to read $8,300, then, is as a funeral home’s bill. The cemetery is a second bill from a second business, and it is the one most families are not braced for.

The itemized table, line by line

NFDA has published its headline medians every edition, but the full itemized breakdown appears in the 2019 study, announced December 19, 2019 — the most recent edition we could read line-by-line at the source rather than behind the members’ wall. The 2019 columns are that edition’s; the figures above are current. It is here because it shows you the shape of the bill, which changes far more slowly than the total:

The single largest line is the nondeclinable basic services fee, and it is the one item on the list you cannot refuse. Everything else on it, you can.

The two cremation numbers that do not agree

This is the trap, and it is in NFDA’s own releases. The 2021 release, announced November 04, 2021, says:

“the median cost of a funeral has increased only 6.6% over the past five years to $7,848 and the median cost of a funeral with cremation has increased 11.3% over the past five years to $6,970.”

That puts the 2021 cremation median at $6,970. But the 2023 release, quoted at the top of this page, gives the 2021 cremation figure as $5,810 — $1,160 lower — and describes its basket as “including alternative cremation casket and urn”. Both numbers are NFDA’s, for the same year.

Each release is internally consistent: $5,810 to $6,280 is the 8.1% it claims, and the 2021 release’s own arithmetic works on its own figures. What neither free release explains is the change in definition between them. The 2019 edition shows why the ambiguity exists: it published two cremation totals, one with the cremation casket and urn and one without.

The practical consequence: anyone who lines up $6,970 against $6,280 concludes cremation got cheaper. It did not. Those are two different baskets, and we are telling you we cannot reconcile them from the free releases — the definition lives in the paid report.

Why this number is so hard to check

NFDA does not publish the study free. Its own release states the terms: “The survey report is free to NFDA members and $175 for nonmembers.” The survey behind it is a census of the association’s own members, not of the public: “A survey was mailed to 5,316 NFDA-member funeral home owners on July 24, 2019, to gather General Price List and other related data.” Of those 5,316, NFDA reports, “Of the potential respondents, 1,027 members anonymously completed the survey (643 mail and 384 online), which accurately reflects NFDA’s total membership (with 95% confidence) within a range of +2.8%.” So the figure describes the prices NFDA members print, at a 2.8-point margin — a real and disclosed sample, and not the same thing as every funeral home in America.

We checked NFDA’s live site on 2026-08-18 before writing any of this. The association rebuilt nfda.org during 2025–26, and the General Price List releases quoted above no longer resolve there; we read them from Internet Archive captures of NFDA’s own pages, and each capture date is listed in the sources below. On the current site, a search of NFDA’s entire public content for the word “median” returns nothing at all, the Research page lists no General Price List Study among its reports, and every “free” report download resolves to an email-capture form. That is why so much of the internet quotes this figure at third hand: the primary is genuinely hard to reach.

The number you can actually act on

A national median is useful for one thing only — knowing roughly whether a quote is ordinary or extreme. It cannot price your funeral, because the 10-item basket above is not what you are obliged to buy. What you can get, today, is the real price list from the homes in your own town, and federal law says they must hand it over.

The FTC Funeral Rule requires a provider to “Give a printed or typewritten price list for retention to persons who inquire in person about the funeral goods, funeral services or prices of funeral goods or services offered by the funeral provider.” It requires the same provider to “Tell persons who ask by telephone about the funeral provider’s offerings or prices any accurate information from the price lists described in paragraphs (b)(2) through (4) of this section and any other readily available information that reasonably answers the question.” The list itself must carry the sentence “The goods and services shown below are those we can provide to our customers. You may choose only the items you desire.” And the rule states that “it is an unfair or deceptive act or practice for a funeral provider, or a crematory, to require that a casket be purchased for direct cremation” — so a direct cremation cannot be gated on buying one. We cover what those rights look like across the table in your rights under the Funeral Rule.

Two itemized lists from two homes in your own town will tell you more than any national median ever printed. If the deceased was a veteran, that total is also worth setting against what VA pays toward it, which is fixed by the date of death. If the question underneath yours is who has to pay the bill, that is a different question with a clearer answer: see who pays for a funeral and funeral costs and the estate. If the person who died was a veteran, VA burial benefits pay a defined amount, and Social Security pays a flat $255.

Sources

• NFDA, “2023 NFDA General Price List Study Shows Inflation Increasing Faster than the Cost of a Funeral,” December 08, 2023 — archived 2024-01-06.
• NFDA, “2021 NFDA General Price List Study Shows Funeral Costs Not Rising as Fast as Rate of Inflation,” November 04, 2021 — archived 2026-02-10.
• NFDA, “2019 NFDA General Price List Study Shows Funeral Costs Not Rising As Fast As Rate of Inflation,” December 19, 2019 — archived 2026-04-15.
• FTC Funeral Rule, 16 CFR Part 453 — eCFR, issue date 2026-08-03.