Our research
How we research cremation and funeral prices
Funeral pricing is opaque by design, and most of what's published about it online is recycled guesswork. Here is exactly where our numbers come from, how often they're checked, and what we do when we get something wrong.
Published General Price Lists
The FTC Funeral Rule requires every US funeral provider to maintain an itemized General Price List. Wherever providers publish these online, we read the actual PDFs rather than marketing pages, and our provider reviews cite the list and its effective date. When a price on this site traces to a specific GPL, that's the strongest evidence class we have.
State and city price tracking
We maintain cost ranges for all 50 states and more than 480 cities and counties, assembled from published provider pricing in each market. Ranges are shown as low, typical and high rather than a single number, because a single number is almost always wrong somewhere.
Official state sources
Legal facts — cremation waiting periods, permit requirements, death certificate fees and ordering channels — are checked against each state's own vital-records office or statutes, and each state page notes when its details were last verified. Government fees change often; we date-stamp rather than pretend permanence.
Named-source provider research
Reviews of national cremation providers are built from primary documents: their own price lists, regulator and court records (including state attorney-general actions), Better Business Bureau files, and their own published statements. Where a fact couldn't be verified against a primary source, we either mark it as reported or leave it out.
What families actually ask us
Families request cremation quotes through this site every day, which gives us something most publishers lack: real demand data. It tells us, for example, that most people researching cremation are planning ahead rather than facing an immediate loss, and it keeps our guidance anchored to the questions real families have rather than the ones that are easy to write about.
How often prices are reviewed
Site-wide price data was last reviewed in September 2026. Provider reviews are refreshed against current price lists and public records on a rolling basis, and each review states when it was last updated. Fees and prices change constantly in this industry; where we can't re-verify something, we say so rather than leave a stale number looking fresh.
How this site makes money
Cremation Institute is an independent information site, not a funeral home, and we don't arrange cremations ourselves. When a family requests a quote, we connect them with a licensed provider serving their area, and providers may pay us an advertising fee for that connection. The fee never changes the price a family pays, and it never changes a price or a verdict we publish. Our provider reviews include companies we have no commercial relationship with, and the criticism in them stays.
Corrections
If you find a price, fee or legal detail on this site that's out of date or wrong, email adam@cremationinstitute.com and we'll check it against the primary source and fix it. The families using this site are often having the worst week of their year; they deserve numbers that are right.
See it in practice