About the Funeral Cost Index dataset

What we hold

The dataset comprises 4,913 funeral director records across the United Kingdom. Of those, 3,378 (69%) have a captured CMA Standardised Price List. Every captured record includes:

• Identity: business name, branch identifier, full postal address, phone number, website URL, geocoded latitude / longitude.
• Ownership: chain group (Co-op Funeralcare, Dignity, Funeral Partners) or “independent”, plus trade-body memberships such as NAFD or SAIF.
• Pricing: the full set of CMA-mandated standardised line items — funeral director’s professional fee, attended cremation total, attended burial total, direct cremation total, and the third-party disbursements (cremation fee, burial fee, doctors’ fees, minister’s fee).
• Provenance: source URL of the captured price list, capture timestamp, extraction method (HTML, PDF text, OCR).

Adjacent datasets on this domain

Three smaller datasets sit beside the funeral price index because they answer the questions the same reader has next. They are held to the same rule — a source URL and a capture date on every figure — but they do not all rest on the same kind of obligation, and that difference is published rather than smoothed over.

• Solicitor fees, mandated: uncontested probate and residential conveyancing, captured from firms’ SRA Price Transparency pages. The SRA Transparency Rules require a firm offering these services to publish a price, so an absent row is a capture failure or a compliance gap.
• Solicitor fees, voluntary: will writing and lasting powers of attorney. Neither is in scope of the Transparency Rules. Firms publish these prices by choice, so coverage is self-selecting toward firms that compete on price, and an absent firm has simply not published a figure. Statutory charges — the Office of the Public Guardian’s LPA registration fee, the probate application fee — are excluded from the captured figures and quoted separately with their GOV.UK source and the date they were read.
• Prepaid funeral plans: published plan prices from FCA-authorised providers, with instalment terms and the capped contribution toward third-party costs held as their own fields. The FCA regulates the sale of plans but does not mandate a published price list, so these are voluntary disclosures too. No provider appears until its firm reference number and permissions have been confirmed against the FCA Financial Services Register — a firm’s own website asserting it is authorised is not accepted as the source.

How we collect it

Since the Funerals Market Investigation Order 2021, every UK funeral director must publish a Standardised Price List on its website in a fixed format. Funeral Cost Index discovers and captures these documents programmatically: trade-body member directories seed the index, each provider’s website is crawled to locate the SPL page or PDF, and standardised line items are extracted via HTML parsing, PDF text extraction, or Google Cloud Vision OCR for image-only PDFs.

Update cadence

The capture pipeline runs continuously, with a full re-scrape weekly. Quarterly snapshots are published at /data.

A quarter’s report is frozen once that quarter closes and does not change afterwards. The figures on it are those the dataset held as at the last day of the quarter, and they stay put however much the dataset grows or is corrected later — a citation has to keep resolving to the same numbers, or it is not a citation. Only the quarter still in progress renders live, and it says so.

Each report states how its figures were fixed. A quarter frozen shortly after it closed is recorded as frozen. One assembled later is recorded as reconstructed: every captured price carries its own capture date, so the figures are exact rather than estimated, but they were fixed after the fact and that is a different claim.

How to cite

For press, academic and policy use we ask for citation in the following form:

Funeral Cost Index, UK Funeral Cost Index — [Quarter] [Year]. Indexeli Intelligence Limited. https://www.funeralcostindex.co.uk/data

How to use it

• Consumers: compare UK funeral directors near you at /search.
• Press & researchers: quarterly releases and methodology at /data. Free to cite with attribution as above.
• Bulk / API access: for licensing the underlying dataset, contact markets@indexeli.com.