From funerals to vets: how the CMA's price-transparency playbook works

The CMA’s Funerals Market Investigation Order 2021 followed its 2018–2020 market investigation into UK funerals. The investigation found that bereaved families were typically unable to compare prices across funeral directors and that pricing was opaque, particularly for the lowest-cost option (direct cremation).

The Order’s central remedy was the Standardised Price List (SPL): every UK funeral director must publish prices on its website in a fixed format covering the funeral director’s professional fee, the all-in price of an attended cremation funeral, the all-in price of an attended burial funeral, the all-in price of a direct (unattended) cremation, and the relevant third-party disbursements (cremation fee, burial fee, doctors’ fees, minister’s fee).

Five years on, Funeral Cost Index aggregates these published Standardised Price Lists into a single national index. Coverage of UK funeral directors with a captured SPL exceeds 60% and continues to grow. The quarterly snapshot lets journalists, policymakers, and bereaved families compare like-for-like prices across the country.

The playbook works for a specific reason: it changes who has the information. Pre-mandate, the funeral director knew the price and the family didn’t. The information asymmetry — combined with the emotional context — meant that price comparison was both practically impossible and socially uncomfortable. Post-mandate, the price is on the website. The information is symmetric.

Standardisation matters as much as disclosure. The CMA could have required disclosure without standardising format — every funeral director publishing prices in their own structure — and the result would have been incomparable. By fixing the format (the same line items in the same order on every director’s site) the Order made aggregation possible. The same is true of the SRA Transparency Rules in legal services and the new CMA Vet Services price-transparency order.

The CMA opened a market investigation into UK veterinary services in May 2024. The investigation’s 2025 final report identified four contributing features of the market — opaque pricing, concentrated corporate ownership, prescription medication margins, and limited choice in out-of-hours care — and ordered remedies that closely echo the funeral playbook. From 2026 every regulated UK vet practice must publish prices on its website for 16 routine services, with VAT inclusion stated explicitly and corporate ownership disclosed.

The vet market is materially larger and more consolidated than the funeral market — six corporate groups (CVS, IVC Evidensia, Linnaeus, Medivet, VetPartners, Pets at Home / Vets4Pets) together own a substantial share of UK first- opinion practices, where the funeral market is dominated by independents alongside three corporate groups (Co-op, Dignity, Funeral Partners). The transparency challenge is structurally similar but the scale is larger.

Vet Cost Index publishes the full CMA Vet Services investigation timeline →

Five years of mandated disclosure in the UK funeral market is enough data to draw early conclusions about what mandatory price-transparency does and doesn’t do.

It surfaces variation. Price ranges across UK funeral directors are wide — direct cremations from under £1,000 to over £3,000 for functionally equivalent services, attended funerals with similar spreads. Pre-mandate this variation was invisible.

It reveals chain pricing. Three corporate groups — Co-op Funeralcare, Dignity, and Funeral Partners — typically price above local independents on routine services. The same pattern is what the CMA expects to see when vet pricing data lands.

It enables comparison without forcing it. The playbook doesn’t require consumers to choose on price, only that they can if they want to. Many families still choose their funeral director on personal recommendation, geography, or trade-body membership — but they now know what the price will be before they commit.

It’s a slow-acting remedy. Five years in, average UK funeral pricing is still rising with general inflation and prices in the most expensive regions remain double those in the cheapest. Mandatory disclosure puts downward pressure but doesn’t set prices; it gives consumers and policymakers the information to apply pressure where they choose.

Indexeli Intelligence Limited publishes Funeral Cost Index, Legal Fee Index (against the SRA Transparency Rules in force since 2018) and Vet Cost Index (against the new CMA Vet Services remedies). The three sites sit on the same dataset substrate, the same disclosure playbook, and the same editorial stance — independent, no commercial relationships with the providers covered, every published price tied back to the source disclosure.

Once the vet data starts flowing in 2026 it’ll be the first opportunity to test whether the playbook generalises: does the funeral pattern (wide variation, corporate premium, slow downward pressure) hold in a larger and more consolidated market? That’s what we’ll be tracking.