Home › The FTC Funeral Rule
Federal law gives you specific, enforceable rights when you buy funeral goods and services. Most people never hear about them, and they are at their least likely to ask on the worst week of their life.
This page summarises the Funeral Rule, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. It is general information, not legal advice, and it does not sell insurance.
If you call a funeral home and ask about prices, they must give you accurate information from their price list, and answer other readily available questions. They cannot require you to give your name, address or telephone number first, and they cannot fob you off with a recorded message alone. This matters because it lets you compare several homes in an afternoon without sitting through an appointment at each.
When you talk in person about arrangements, goods or prices, the funeral home must give you a General Price List. Not show you. Give you, to take away and keep.
It must itemise prices for sixteen specified goods and services, and it must carry required disclosures about your right to choose only what you want, about embalming, about alternative containers, about the basic services fee, and about the separate casket and burial container price lists.
If casket prices are not on the General Price List, the home must give you a separate Casket Price List, with enough description to identify each one — and it must be given to you before you are shown the caskets themselves. The sequencing is deliberate. It is much harder to compare prices calmly once you are standing in the selection room. The same applies to outer burial containers and vaults, which have their own price list.
Funeral homes may offer packages, but only in addition to itemised prices, never instead of them. You always have the right to choose individual items and decline the rest. If you are told a particular set of services must be bought together, ask for the itemised list and the written explanation of why.
If you buy a casket from a third-party retailer, the funeral home cannot charge you a handling fee or surcharge for using it. They must accept it and they must not condition their services on you buying theirs. The FTC puts the average casket at slightly more than $2,000, and says mahogany, bronze or copper caskets sell for as much as $10,000. Caskets bought independently are frequently a great deal cheaper than the ones in the selection room, and this is the provision that makes that route usable.
This is the most commonly misunderstood point, and the most expensive one to get wrong. In most circumstances embalming is not required by law. It may be required by a particular state in specific situations, or practically necessary for a public viewing after a delay, but it is not a blanket legal requirement.
A funeral home may only charge for embalming where state law requires it in that situation, or where the family gave express prior approval, or under narrow conditions where the family could not be reached and approval followed. The itemised statement must say which of those applies. If someone tells you the law requires embalming, ask them to point to the provision.
At the end of the arrangement conference you must receive a Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected, itemising everything you chose with its individual price and the total. It must state that you are being charged only for the items you selected or that are required by law, must address embalming approval, and must disclose any service charge added to cash advance items such as flowers or obituary notices. Read it before you sign it, and take it home.
Most funeral directors follow the rule and many are genuinely helpful. If one will not give you a price list, insists on a package, or charges you for a casket bought elsewhere, you can raise it with your state funeral board, your state attorney general, or the Federal Trade Commission. Saying out loud that you know the Funeral Rule exists is often enough on its own.
Because the amount of cover someone needs depends entirely on what they are actually going to be charged, and because a family who knows these rights will spend less than one that does not. What a funeral costs covers the numbers themselves.
Source: U.S. Federal Trade Commission, The Funeral Rule, and FTC guidance on complying with it. Casket price ranges, FTC, Funeral Costs and Pricing Checklist. This page is a plain-language summary and is not legal advice. State law adds requirements in some jurisdictions. Where this summary and the rule itself differ, the rule governs.
Last reviewed September 2026.
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