Reference
Funeral Cost Index methodology
Funeral Cost Index collects published UK funeral director prices from CMA Standardised Price Lists, normalises the headline fields, and presents them for like-for-like comparison by provider, service and local area.
Source data
Prices are taken from funeral directors’ published CMA Standardised Price Lists where available. Each captured price list stores its source URL and a capture date, so figures can be traced back to the provider’s own disclosure. The capture date is when the figure was last read at a new value, not when it was last checked: see what we exclude and how often we capture.
What we capture
Headline fields include direct cremation, attended funeral director charges, unattended burial funeral director charges, professional fee, coffin/hearse indicators where available, source URL and capture date.
Direct cremation prices usually include the cremation fee. Attended funeral figures normally show funeral director charges only and may exclude crematorium, burial, minister, celebrant, doctors’ fees and cemetery charges.
Medians are used rather than averages on local and national summaries to reduce distortion from unusually high or low published prices.
Providers can request corrections via the corrections page. Funeral Cost Index does not sell placement to funeral directors and does not rank providers by commission.
What we exclude, and how often we capture
A captured figure outside the publish band for its service is not used in any median, range, title or answer. It stays on the captured record, and the provider’s page shows it as under review. The bands are set wide around the captured distribution, so they remove misread figures (a list number or page reference read as a price, or a placeholder of £1) rather than unusually high or low genuine prices.
- Direct cremation (all-in): £600 to £4,500
- Attended funeral (funeral director's charges): £800 to £8,000
- Unattended burial (funeral director's charges): £700 to £6,000
If any headline figure on a captured price list falls outside its band, the whole capture is held back, including the professional fee: a misread rarely hits one line, and the other figures came from the same document. A capture whose source document is not a price list (for example a disclosure-of-interests PDF) is held back in the same way. The professional fee has no band of its own: on the latest captures in November 2026 fees ran from £50 to £2,946, and the low end includes genuine fees.
Crematorium fees are captured separately, from each crematorium’s published fee schedule. A standard attended cremation fee outside £500 to £2,500 is withheld unless it has been checked against the operator’s own page.
Every funeral director with a website is re-read once a week, on Monday mornings. A new capture is recorded only when a figure changes, so the capture date shown beside a price is when it was last read at a new value. A price captured months ago can still be current; provider pages also say when the list was last read, or that the last attempt could not read it.
Local authority data
Our funeral costs by council area resource groups provider prices by local authority, matching each provider’s postcode to its ONS local authority district code. Some areas have limited data where providers do not publish accessible price lists.
Publisher credentials
Funeral Cost Index is published by Peter Langdon FCA through Indexeli Intelligence Limited. Peter is listed in ICAEW’s Find a Chartered Accountant directory, and the project applies an accountancy-led approach to public-interest price transparency, source evidence, correction handling, and clear separation between captured prices and estimates.
View Peter Langdon’s ICAEW directory profile · ICAEW does not endorse, verify, or operate Funeral Cost Index.