Funeral Cost Index

Documentation

About the Funeral Cost Index dataset

Funeral Cost Index publishes UK funeral pricing data drawn from Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Standardised Price Lists. This page documents what the dataset contains, how it is collected, how fresh it is, and how to cite or license it.

What we hold

The dataset comprises 4,913 funeral director records across the United Kingdom. Of those, 3,278 (67%) 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).

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.

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://funeralcostindex.co.uk/data

How to use it

  • Consumers: compare 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.

Editorial stance

Funeral Cost Index is independent. We have no commercial relationships with funeral directors, no paid placements, no referral fees, and no editorial influence from the entities covered. Every published price comes from a funeral director’s own legally mandated disclosure, with the source URL preserved for audit.