How much do funeral home owners make? No public source reports a funeral home owner salary. The nearest official figure is the Bureau of Labor Statistics median wage for funeral home managers: $78,790 a year in May 2025. An owner’s income is a wage like that plus the profit the firm leaves, and the profit is the part an owner can change.
How much do funeral home owners make?
Funeral home owners make a wage for the work they do plus the profit their firm leaves, and no public source that we found reports the total. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes wages for funeral home managers, the occupation closest to a working owner. The median was $78,790 in May 2025. The lowest-paid 10 percent earned less than $49,700, and the highest-paid 10 percent earned more than $156,400.
The BLS wage figure leaves owners out in two ways. The survey behind it does not cover the self-employed, or the owners and partners of unincorporated firms, and self-employed workers held 58% of funeral home manager jobs in 2025. The survey also counts wages only, so profit never appears. This article quotes no salary website, because a figure with no stated method cannot be checked.
What does the Bureau of Labor Statistics say funeral home managers and funeral directors earn?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median annual wage of $78,790 for funeral home managers and $55,010 for morticians, undertakers and funeral arrangers in May 2025. A median is the middle value: half of workers earned more and half earned less. May 2025 was the latest BLS figure in September 2026, so it also answers a search for funeral director salary in 2026.
| Measure | Funeral home managers | Morticians, undertakers and funeral arrangers |
|---|---|---|
| Median annual wage, May 2025 | $78,790 | $55,010 |
| Lowest-paid 10 percent earned less than | $49,700 | $33,350 |
| Highest-paid 10 percent earned more than | $156,400 | $88,620 |
| Jobs, 2025 | 34,800 | 26,700 |
| Share held by self-employed workers | 58% | 5% |
| Projected job growth, 2025 to 2035 | 4% | 3% |
A working owner does both BLS jobs. Funeral home managers run the business, and morticians and funeral arrangers plan each funeral. The gap between the two medians is $23,780 a year. More figures on the profession are in funeral industry statistics for 2026.
How is an owner’s income different from a salary?
An owner’s income is a wage plus a return on owning the firm. Owner income is the total an owner receives from the business in a year, before personal income tax. The wage is set in advance and paid for work. The profit is whatever is left after every bill, and it moves with each call gained or lost.
| Kind of money | What it pays for | What changes it |
|---|---|---|
| Wage | Your work as director and manager | What the firm would pay someone else |
| Profit | The risk of ownership | Calls, mix, costs and collections |
| Rent | The building, if you own it outside the firm | The lease you set |
| Sale value | The firm itself, once | Earnings a buyer can verify |
The Internal Revenue Service makes the wage a rule for one kind of firm. According to the IRS, an S corporation must pay a shareholder who works in the business reasonable compensation before non-wage distributions. One factor the IRS lists is what comparable businesses pay for similar services.
Profit on paper is not cash in your account. Loan principal, a replacement hearse and a roof repair all come out of profit first. Sale value is covered in what a funeral home is worth.
How do you work out what your own firm should pay you?
Work out your own pay in three steps: add up a year of revenue by service type, subtract every cost except your own pay, then split what is left into a wage and a profit. A call, or case, is one death the firm is engaged to handle. Every figure in the 200-call example below is illustrative, and the example is not a benchmark.
Three inputs in the example are built from published figures. The 200 calls are this article’s own arithmetic, not a published average: the 3,072,666 deaths the CDC registered in 2024, divided by the 15,401 funeral homes the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) counts, gives 199.5, rounded to 200. The burial and cremation shares follow NFDA’s projected 2025 rates, and the two service prices are NFDA’s 2023 medians. Respondents to the 2024 Connecting Directors survey averaged 377 calls, so they ran busier firms.
| Service | Calls | Price | Revenue | Price input |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burial with viewing | 63 | $8,300 | $522,900 | NFDA 2023 median |
| Cremation with viewing | 45 | $6,280 | $282,600 | NFDA 2023 median |
| Direct cremation | 82 | $2,500 | $205,000 | Placeholder |
| Other calls | 10 | $1,500 | $15,000 | Placeholder |
| Total | 200 | $5,128 average | $1,025,500 | Arithmetic |
Every cost in the second table is a placeholder, and so is the split between the two kinds of cremation. Replace each with the figure from your own profit and loss statement. The owner’s wage is the BLS median for funeral home managers.
| Line | Amount | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $1,025,500 | 100% |
| Merchandise and crematory fees | $235,000 | 22.9% |
| Staff pay, taxes and benefits, not the owner | $290,000 | 28.3% |
| Building costs | $140,000 | 13.7% |
| Vehicles and equipment | $45,000 | 4.4% |
| Office, phones, software and marketing | $70,000 | 6.8% |
| Balances never collected | $20,510 | 2.0% |
| Left before the owner is paid | $224,990 | 21.9% |
| Owner’s wage (BLS median) | $78,790 | 7.7% |
| Profit after the owner’s wage | $146,200 | 14.3% |
| Loan principal and reserves | $60,000 | 5.9% |
| Cash beyond the wage | $86,200 | 8.4% |
The example firm leaves $224,990 before the owner is paid: a $78,790 wage and $146,200 of profit. Only $164,990 is cash the owner can take, because $60,000 goes to loan principal and reserves. The merchandise line assumes $1,900 for a burial, $1,300 for a cremation with viewing, $650 for a direct cremation and $350 for other calls.
| Change | Revenue | Left before the owner is paid |
|---|---|---|
| No change | $1,025,500 | $224,990 |
| 10% fewer calls, same fixed costs | $922,950 | $147,991 |
| 10 burials become direct cremations | $967,500 | $180,650 |
| The 2% written off is collected | $1,025,500 | $245,500 |
| $200 more billed per call | $1,065,500 | $264,190 |
The row for 10% fewer calls is the one to study. A 10% fall in calls removes about a third of what is left for the owner, because staff, building, vehicle and office costs stay the same.
What decides funeral home profit?
Six things decide funeral home profit: call volume, service mix, revenue per case, staffing cost, facility cost and receivables. Profit is revenue minus every cost, including a fair wage for the owner. Each can be measured monthly from your own records.
| Driver | What to measure | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Call volume | Calls against the same month last year | Fixed costs are spread over every call |
| Service mix | Share of burial, cremation with service, and direct cremation | Each type has its own price and cost |
| Revenue per case | Revenue divided by calls | Shows price and mix in one figure |
| Staffing cost | Pay, taxes and benefits as a share of revenue | The largest cost in the example |
| Facility cost | Rent or loan, tax, utilities and upkeep | Does not fall when calls fall |
| Receivables | Balance owed and its age, by case | Earned revenue you cannot yet spend |
Call volume depends first on the number of deaths, which no owner controls. The CDC registered 3,072,666 deaths in the United States in 2024, which was 18,298 fewer than in 2023. IBISWorld’s public summary puts the US funeral services market at $18.1 billion in 2026, after a decline of 3.2% a year between 2021 and 2026.
Staffing is a cost and a limit at once. In the 2024 Connecting Directors survey, 44% of respondents named recruiting and retaining employees as their top challenge. Define the six figures with funeral home KPIs, and read funeral home pricing strategy before you change a price list.
What is a normal funeral home profit margin?
No free, current source that we could find publishes a net profit margin for independent funeral homes, so this article does not give one. A profit margin is profit divided by revenue, shown as a percentage. The funeral home profit margin figures that are public measure different kinds of profit.
| Source | Data year | Figure | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Johnson Consulting Group | 2023 | 26% to 31% of revenue | EBITDA it calls healthy |
| Federated Funeral Directors of America | 2010 | 5.5% of sales | Average profit before income tax |
| IBISWorld | 2026 | Not public | Margin is in the paid report |
| This article’s example | Illustrative | 14.3% of revenue | Profit after the owner’s wage |
EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Johnson Consulting Group, a funeral home and cemetery consulting firm, wrote in November 2023 that a healthy industry standard is EBITDA of 26% to 31% of revenue, citing its own accounting and merger data. EBITDA leaves out loan interest and depreciation, so it runs higher than the profit on a tax return.
Connecting Directors reported in May 2011 that Federated Funeral Directors of America put average profit before income tax at 5.5% of sales in 2010. Federated Fiducial’s 2025 Stats Book of funeral home income and expense data is available to its clients only. Anyone starting a funeral home should ask a funeral home accountant for current figures.
How does the rising cremation rate change owner income?
A rising cremation rate lowers average revenue per case, and owner income falls with it unless cost per case falls too. NFDA projected a 2025 cremation rate of 63.4% and a burial rate of 31.6%, and expects cremation to reach 82.3% by 2045. The Cremation Association of North America reports 62.8% for 2025 and projects 69.1% for 2030.
NFDA’s 2023 price study shows the gap per case. The median cost of a funeral with viewing and burial was $8,300, and the median with viewing and cremation was $6,280, a difference of $2,020. A direct cremation is a cremation with no viewing or ceremony beforehand. NFDA’s release gives no median for it, so the worked example uses a placeholder.
Johnson Consulting Group published a hypothetical in April 2024 that shows the effect on profit. A 200-call firm split evenly between burial and cremation earned a 30% profit. At 40% burial and 60% cremation, with costs unchanged, profit fell to 18.6%. In this article’s example, moving 10 burials to direct cremation costs the owner $44,340.
Cost per case is the part an owner controls. See funeral home profitability as cremation grows and growing revenue per case ethically.
Where does money leak in a small funeral home?
Money leaks in four places: first calls that go unanswered, balances collected late or never, details typed twice, and items delivered but never billed. None of the four appears as a line on a profit and loss statement.
- Missed first calls. In ASD’s 2017 survey of more than 1,700 funeral professionals, 6% had issues with missing urgent calls in the previous 12 months. One call in the worked example averages $5,128. Count yours with the method in funeral home missed calls.
- Slow collections. A balance owed for 90 days cannot pay a wage. Start with accounts receivable tracked by case and a payment dashboard.
- Retyping. A detail typed on the first call sheet, the contract and the books costs staff time three times. See what to automate in funeral home bookkeeping, and price the hours with the software ROI calculator.
- Unbilled items. Extra death certificates or a second day of visitation can be delivered and never reach the statement.
Small leaks add up in the worked example. Billing $200 more per call and collecting the 2% of balances written off would add about $60,000 a year, more than a quarter of what the example firm leaves for its owner.
What can an owner change this quarter?
An owner can change collections, billing and call coverage within a quarter. Prices, staffing and the building take longer.
- Pull twelve months of calls by service type, and work out average revenue per case for each.
- List every balance more than 30 days old by case, and give one person the weekly follow-up.
- Take a deposit at the arrangement conference, and offer card and bank payment on every statement.
- Compare ten closed cases against what was delivered, and bill or write off each missed item.
- Count one month of missed calls from your carrier’s records, and fix any gap in call forwarding.
- Rebuild the worked example with your own figures, then take it to your accountant.
How FuneralHQ handles this
FuneralHQ supplies the revenue side of this arithmetic. Reporting reads from live case records and shows case volume, the burial and cremation mix, revenue, outstanding balances and payments collected, by period and by location. Payments takes card and ACH payments in person or through a link, records deposits and payment plans, and keeps the balance on the case. Processing fees apply. Payments sync to QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop. FuneralHQ also includes a built-in general ledger, payroll, and trust accounting. For how these parts fit together, see a complete funeral home software system in outline. A firm with a bookkeeper and a clean monthly close may already hold every figure in this article, and needs no added software to use them.
Questions to ask your accountant
Take two years of profit and loss statements and these eight questions to your accountant.
- What would the firm pay a manager to do my job, and do I pay myself that?
- How is the firm organized for tax, and how should my wage and profit be paid?
- What was last year’s profit after a fair wage for me, as a share of revenue?
- What was EBITDA, and which personal or one-time costs would a buyer add back?
- What did each call cost in staff, building and vehicles, compared with two years ago?
- How much revenue did we write off, and how old are the balances we still carry?
- If I own the building, is the rent the firm pays me at a market rate?
- How many calls do we need each year to cover every cost and my wage?
Common questions about funeral home owner pay
What is the average funeral director salary in 2026?
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figure is a median annual wage of $55,010 for morticians, undertakers and funeral arrangers in May 2025. The lowest-paid 10 percent earned less than $33,350, and the highest-paid 10 percent earned more than $88,620. The BLS had issued no 2026 figure by September 2026.
Do funeral home owners make six figures?
No public source says how many funeral home owners earn six figures. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the highest-paid 10 percent of funeral home managers earned more than $156,400 in wages in May 2025. An owner’s total also includes profit, which the wage figure leaves out.
Is owning a funeral home profitable?
Owning a funeral home can be profitable, and the result depends on call volume, service mix and cost control. Johnson Consulting Group calls EBITDA of 26% to 31% of revenue a healthy industry standard. IBISWorld’s public summary says the funeral services market declined 3.2% a year between 2021 and 2026.
How many calls does a funeral home need to break even?
Divide your fixed costs by what each call leaves after merchandise and uncollected balances. In this article’s illustrative example, fixed costs of $545,000 plus the owner’s wage of $78,790 are divided by $3,850 a call, which gives about 162 calls. Your own figure depends on your costs and prices.
Why do salary websites show different numbers for funeral home owners?
The main federal wage survey leaves owners out, so no website can take an owner figure from it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says its survey does not cover the self-employed, or the owners and partners of unincorporated firms. A figure with no sample size, date or definition of income cannot be checked.
Do funeral home owners pay themselves a salary?
Whether an owner takes a salary depends on how the firm is organized. The Internal Revenue Service says an officer of a corporation is generally an employee, and that partners receive distributions or guaranteed payments and not a Form W-2. Ask your accountant which rule applies to your firm.
Does owning the building change what an owner earns?
Owning the building adds a third stream of income. An owner who holds the building outside the firm and leases it back receives rent as well as a wage and profit. The rent is a cost to the firm, so compare rent, wage and profit together.
Does what I pay myself affect what the firm is worth?
Your pay is an operating expense, so it changes the earnings figure a buyer reads. Johnson Consulting Group wrote in November 2023 that a $10,000 decrease in annual operating expense can equate to more than $50,000 in enterprise value. Ask your accountant what wage a buyer would assume.
The FuneralHQ advantage
Give the owner one view of the operation
FuneralHQ brings the case, open work, payments, documents, and location reporting together so decisions come from current operating data rather than a month-end reconstruction.
The walkthrough separates what ships today from what is in development, then tests FuneralHQ against one of your real workflows.
Challenge us with your workflowSources
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Outlook Handbook, funeral service workers (May 2025 wages, 2025 employment)
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, frequently asked questions
- National Funeral Directors Association: statistics (updated September 29, 2025)
- National Funeral Directors Association: 2023 General Price List Study news release (December 8, 2023)
- Cremation Association of North America: industry statistical information
- CDC National Center for Health Statistics: Mortality in the United States, 2024 (Data Brief 548)
- Connecting Directors: 2024 deathcare survey results (March 27, 2024)
- Johnson Consulting Group: why independent funeral home owners need to think like private equity (November 13, 2023)
- Johnson Consulting Group: understanding your recovery cost (April 5, 2024)
- Connecting Directors: FFDA reports funeral profits rebound (May 23, 2011)
- Federated Fiducial: Stats Book for funeral homes
- IBISWorld: Funeral Services in the US industry analysis, public summary (2026)
- Internal Revenue Service: S corporation compensation and medical insurance issues
- Internal Revenue Service: paying yourself
- ASD: insights from the 2017 funeral home marketing and communication survey
About the FuneralHQ Editorial Team
This guide was written by the FuneralHQ Editorial Team, the in-house team behind funeral home software used by independent firms to run cases, documents, payments, and QuickBooks sync in one record. Our editorial standards explain how we review product claims, outside sources, automation, updates, and corrections.