Editorial Standards

This page covers three things: where our cost figures come from, what we mean when we say this site is not professional advice, and what happens when a reader tells us we got something wrong. Chris Terry, who owns this site, set these rules and is the person accountable if a guide fails to meet them.

How we source cost figures

Every price range on this site traces back to one of two places. Most come from this calculator's own model, built from published funeral home price lists and industry cost research and labeled clearly as our own estimate rather than a quote from any specific provider. When we cite an outside figure, the Social Security death benefit amount or a state's burial-assistance threshold, for example, we name the source and the year right next to the number. We do not average anonymous survey results we cannot verify, and we do not accept pricing data from funeral homes or cremation providers in exchange for coverage.

What "not professional advice" means here

Naomi Foster, who writes our guides, researches and reports on cremation costs; she is not a funeral director, attorney, or financial advisor, and nothing she writes replaces a conversation with one. Where a guide touches on legal requirements, such as the FTC Funeral Rule, or benefits programs, such as Social Security's death benefit, it summarizes publicly available rules as they stood on the date the page was last updated, and rules do change. Confirm anything time-sensitive directly with the relevant agency or provider before you rely on it.

Corrections

Found something wrong, a stale figure, a broken link, a state rule that changed? Tell us through the contact page. Naomi checks correction requests against the original source before anything changes. When a correction lands, we update the page's date and note what changed at the bottom of the guide if the fix affects a cost figure.

What we will not do

• We will not rank or recommend a specific funeral home or cremation provider in exchange for payment.
• We will not publish a guide under a fabricated author or an uncredited "review board."
• We will not present this site's own baseline estimates as a substitute for a written quote from a real provider.

See the authors page for who actually writes and edits this site.