A brochure turned up in my mailbox last week. Plan your funeral now, it said. Lock in today’s price.
I almost dropped it in the recycling with the pizza coupons. Then I did the math on the back of it. I stopped laughing.
Here is what those mailers know. The way Americans leave has flipped.
For most of the last century, you were buried. A plot, a casket, a graveside service. Now most of us are cremated instead. The urn passed the plot a decade ago. It has not looked back.
More than six in ten Americans are cremated today. By the time this cohort finishes its run, the number is headed toward eight in ten.
63.4%
Americans cremated in 2025, and the share climbs every year.
31.6%
Americans still buried, a number in steady decline.
The lines crossed around 2015. By 2045 the industry’s own group expects roughly eight in ten cremated, and one in ten buried.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and the one aisle every reader eventually reaches.
Start with the demand. It is the surest demand there is. Every one of us is a customer, once.
About three million Americans die each year now. As this generation ages in, that climbs about a quarter over the next two decades. Nearly four million a year by 2045. Not a guess about taste. A line drawn straight off a birth-year chart.
This is the most reliable schedule in the whole economy. The customer cannot cancel. The customer cannot shop somewhere cheaper forever. And the customer always, eventually, shows up.
Now the part the obituaries page will not tell you. The wave is the obvious half. Everyone can see more funerals coming.
The number that decides the winners is a different one. It is the size of the average goodbye. And that is shrinking.
A funeral with a burial runs about $8,300. A funeral with cremation runs closer to $6,280. A direct cremation, no service and no viewing, can cost a small fraction of either.
So read it the other way around. The funerals are getting more common and cheaper at the same time. Rising volume, falling ticket.
That is a very different business from the one the headlines are selling.
Two chairs, as always. From the family chair, this is mercy and math both. You lock a price against an event you cannot dodge. You spare the kids the worst week of decisions of their lives.
From the other chair, it is the steadiest storefront in America. The customers are guaranteed. The timing is on a schedule. And more and more of them pay years in advance, in full. For a service the seller will not deliver for a decade.
Now the catch. This one is real. The same shift that guarantees the volume is squeezing the price.
Run the numbers on a single funeral home. An all-burial book might gross near nine hundred thousand a year. Shift it to mostly cremation. That can fall by a third. Go to mostly no-frills direct cremation. That can more than halve it.
Two more headwinds. The government is pushing these businesses to post prices online. That turns a discreet purchase into a shopping-around one.
And the cheapest options keep multiplying, from bare-bones cremation startups to newer green services that turn the body into soil.
So this is not a fountain of easy money. It is a wave of customers colliding with a race to the bottom on price. The winner is whoever is built for cheap and many, not dear and few.
The arithmetic
The cremation rate of 63.4 percent in 2025, the burial rate of 31.6 percent, and the path toward 82.3 percent cremation and 13 percent burial by 2045: the National Funeral Directors Association 2025 Cremation and Burial Report, released October 2025 and compiled with the University of Wisconsin population lab. Deaths climbing about 26 percent over two decades toward roughly 3.9 million a year by 2045: the same report. The median cost of a funeral, about $8,300 with burial and about $6,280 with cremation: NFDA, 2023 figures. The per-home revenue math is an industry illustration built on those costs. That providers face a federal push to post prices online, and that funeral-home counts have fallen from more than 22,000 a decade ago toward 15,000: NFDA and the Federal Trade Commission. The read on who profits, and the framing of the shrinking check, are Boomers Trade’s own.
So the mailer was not wrong. The event is coming for all of us. It is the one bill you can settle before it arrives. The rest of us are the volume. Somebody owns the crematory and holds the prepaid paper. And is in no hurry. The calendar does the selling. Watch the average check, not the headcount. The goodbyes were always coming. The only open question is how cheaply, and to whose register.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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