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Funeral home managers

Also called Funeral director manager, Mortuary manager, Cemetery manager, Funeral service manager, Crematory manager

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 13,910 US funeral home managers, with median pay of $78,790 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 14,200, in May 2023, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 9,891 from 1890, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for funeral home managers: Online price comparison and cremation platforms, 2005 to 2020.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 4.1% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Funeral home managers: jobs and pay since 1890 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-9171

Chicago

Future History. "Funeral home managers: jobs and pay since 1890." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-9171.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_11_9171, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Funeral home managers: jobs and pay since 1890}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-9171}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1850187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Undertaker / Coffin Maker (cabinet-maker and carpenter era)
Known then as Undertaker (Civil War embalming era, early professionalization)
Known then as Mortician / Funeral Director (state-licensing era)
Known then as Funeral Director / Funeral Home Manager (regulatory-reform and consolidation era)
Known then as Funeral Home Managers (BLS SOC 11-9171)
Known today as Funeral Home Managers (BLS SOC 11-9171)
Projected to still be called Funeral Home Managers (BLS SOC 11-9171)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
14K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$78,790
Est.

≈ $76,770 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1865

President Lincoln's funeral in April 1865 was the single most consequential event in the history of American funeral service. His embalmed body was transported by train from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, over 12 days and 1,654 miles, with public viewings in major cities along the route. An estimated 7 million people viewed the procession or the body. The national demonstration of embalming technology to a mass audience created consumer demand for preserved, viewable bodies that would define American funeral practice for the next 150 years and justify the commercial funeral home as an institution.

Beat · 1882

The National Funeral Directors Association was founded in 1882, the same year the first mortuary science school in the United States opened. These simultaneous events mark the beginning of funeral service as an organized profession with educational standards, a professional identity, and a collective voice in public policy. Within two years, state licensing movements had begun; within twelve years, the first state (Virginia, 1894) had enacted embalming licensing laws.

Beat · 1963

Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death" (1963) exposed systematic pricing opacity and grief-exploitation in the American funeral industry, triggering the FTC investigation (1972) and the Funeral Rule (1984). The book sold out on its first day of publication; millions of copies have been sold since. Mitford published a follow-up, "The American Way of Death Revisited," two years before her death in 1996, finding the industry still resistant to the transparency the Rule was intended to enforce. The Mitford era permanently changed public expectations of funeral pricing transparency and gave the FTC Funeral Rule its moral foundation.

Beat · 1984

The FTC Funeral Rule (16 CFR Part 453) took effect in 1984, requiring funeral homes to provide written itemized General Price Lists to all in-person inquirers, prohibiting package pricing that obscured individual item costs, and mandating specific disclosure language in all contracts. The Rule is enforced by FTC civil penalty (up to $50,000 per violation). Through the late 1980s, the FTC estimated fewer than half of funeral homes complied; by 1999, the GAO found compliance "very high." The 2024 FTC review of the Rule is exploring extension to online price transparency requirements.

Beat · 1999

Service Corporation International owned and operated 3,823 funeral service locations, 525 cemeteries, and 198 crematoria in 20 countries on five continents at the close of 1999, making it by far the largest funeral services company in history. The consolidation wave SCI had pioneered from the 1960s onward was at its peak; Stewart Enterprises, Alderwoods Group, and Carriage Services had built similar, smaller portfolios. The 1990s were the defining decade for industry concentration, with the top five publicly traded operators controlling about one-fifth of domestic revenues while more than 22,000 funeral homes remained privately and often family-owned.

Beat · 2023

The US cremation rate reached 60.5% in 2023, crossing a historic majority threshold and marking the decisive end of traditional embalmed-burial as the default American death-care choice. The NFDA projects the rate will reach 82.3% by 2045. The shift is driven by cost (direct cremation averages roughly $1,000-$3,000 versus $8,000-$12,000 for a traditional burial service), environmental concern, reduced religious prescription among a less religiously affiliated population, and the growing acceptance of memorialization separated in time and place from the disposition itself.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace funeral home managers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+4.1%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-9171 (Funeral home managers): 34.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 36.2 thousand in 2035, a change of +1.4 thousand (+4.1%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (58.1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
53.6%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-9171.00 Funeral Home Managers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.536, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.286 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.786; GPT-4-rated β 0.429. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for funeral home managers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOversee obituary creation and digital memorial publication: using AI-assisted obituary tools (FuneralOne LifeTribute AI, FrontRunner AI, Tribute Technology) to generate initial drafts from structured family intake forms

Oversee obituary creation and digital memorial publication: using AI-assisted obituary tools (FuneralOne LifeTribute AI, FrontRunner AI, Tribute Technology) to generate initial drafts from structured family intake forms; conducting director review for factual accuracy, appropriate tone, and cultural sensitivity before presenting to the family; obtaining explicit family consent for any AI-assisted content per NFDA 2025 guidance; publishing finalized obituaries to digital memorial platforms and newspaper outlets; and configuring digital memorial pages that allow the family to share photos, videos, and tributes.[9],[3]

Where your edge is

AI obituary tools now generate serviceable first drafts in under two minutes from structured inputs: this task has been substantially augmented. Your professional responsibility has shifted from writer to editor and quality-gatekeeper: ensure every AI-generated obituary has gone through your own factual review and the family's explicit sign-off before publication. NFDA's 2025 guidance makes this a professional standard, not just a best practice. The error that matters is the one that appears in print: an incorrect middle name, a misattributed cause of death, or a tone-deaf phrase in a death notice is a failure the community will remember. Invest in your editing speed and emotional intelligence about tone: those are the skills AI lacks.

Get started with these tools
AI is sitting alongside you hereProduce and deliver digital funeral services using AI-assisted livestreaming and memorial technology, configuring and operating OneRoom Technology's AI-powered livestreaming platform (automated camera switching, real-time comment moderation, recording, post-service video distribution) to serve families who cannot attend in person

Produce and deliver digital funeral services using AI-assisted livestreaming and memorial technology, configuring and operating OneRoom Technology's AI-powered livestreaming platform (automated camera switching, real-time comment moderation, recording, post-service video distribution) to serve families who cannot attend in person; consulting families on premium digital memorial options including AI-interactive legacy platforms (StoryFile, HereAfter AI, Eternos) that allow families to preserve and interact with the deceased's voice, stories, and image; and managing post-service digital access for families who want to revisit or share the service recording.[10],[11],[5]

Where your edge is

AI-powered livestreaming has moved from an optional add-on to an expected service offering at premium funeral homes: the funeral director who delivers a professionally produced, technically glitch-free livestream to out-of-state family members is providing something families remember for decades. Invest in the technical fluency to configure and troubleshoot these systems confidently; a failed livestream during a graveside service is a permanent reputational mark. The higher-value opportunity is in digital legacy platforms (StoryFile, HereAfter AI, Eternos): these carry genuine ethical complexity (family consent, data-use terms, digital afterlife governance) that you need to understand and discuss honestly with families before selling. Position yourself as the funeral director who leads these conversations with transparency, not just as a technology vendor.

AI is sitting alongside you hereManage pre-need funeral contract sales and regulatory compliance: using FrontRunner Professional's AI pre-need CRM to automate follow-up sequences for community outreach contacts, generate digital pricing presentation materials for pre-arrangement consultations, and track trust-fund placement and policy delivery compliance with state pre-need regulations

Manage pre-need funeral contract sales and regulatory compliance: using FrontRunner Professional's AI pre-need CRM to automate follow-up sequences for community outreach contacts, generate digital pricing presentation materials for pre-arrangement consultations, and track trust-fund placement and policy delivery compliance with state pre-need regulations; conducting pre-arrangement consultations with healthy adults who want to spare their families the decision burden and lock in current pricing; and ensuring all pre-need contracts include required state disclosure language and are funded in approved vehicles (preneed trust, insurance-funded). SCI 2025: AI-assisted pre-need sales identified as major revenue growth initiative.[12],[13],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Pre-need is the most strategic revenue activity a funeral home manager can invest in: a pre-need contract is a guaranteed future call at a fixed-margin service. FrontRunner AI's pre-need module automates the follow-up cadence that most funeral home operators neglect because they are occupied with at-need cases. But the consultation itself is a human relationship: the consumer who pre-plans their own funeral needs a director who can discuss death directly and comfortably, honor their wishes with specificity, and answer uncomfortable questions (what happens if the funeral home closes? what if I move?) with honest, knowledgeable answers. Build your pre-need compliance knowledge: state pre-need trust and insurance funding requirements vary significantly, and a compliance error in pre-need creates consumer financial harm that regulators prosecute aggressively.

Where funeral home managers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

General and Operations Managers

Funeral home managers who operate or manage multiple locations (or who work within regional consolidators like SCI/Dignity Memorial, Carriage Services, or Park Lawn Corporation) already perform the work of a general operations manager: P&L oversight, vendor and contract management, staff hiring and development across locations, marketing strategy, and technology platform governance. The pivot toward general operations management formalizes this scope and opens pathways into non-funeral-industry operations roles where death-care experience transfers as evidence of crisis management capability, high-stakes client communication, regulatory compliance expertise, and small-business operations competency. The primary credentialing signal for cross-industry transitions is an MBA or formal management credential that contextualizes death-care experience for non-industry hiring managers.

What you'd add
  • · Multi-location operations management: performance metrics framework, location P&L reporting, standardization of service protocols across facilities
  • · MBA or management credential: necessary for cross-industry transitions where death-care background is unfamiliar to hiring managers
  • · Financial management depth: multi-entity financial consolidation, budgeting at portfolio scale, M&A evaluation for funeral home acquisition (common growth mode for group operators)
  • · HR management: compensation benchmarking, benefits administration, performance management systems for larger staff populations
  • · Technology platform governance: evaluating and implementing enterprise funeral management platforms (FrontRunner, Passare, OFDA) across multiple locations with consistent configuration and training
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of funeral home managers changed since 1840?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Carpenter's tools and ice preservation (pre-embalming era)

    Before arterial embalming, the "undertaker" worked with the tools of a carpenter: hand saws, chisels, and planes for coffin-making, a horse-drawn hearse for transport, and simple ice or sawdust packing to slow decomposition for a few days of home viewing. The arranging and management function was minimal: a contract with the family for a coffin and transport, a brief coordination with the church and sextons for the grave. No dedicated establishments; the work happened in the furniture shop or at the family's home.

  • Arterial embalming with formaldehyde (Civil War breakthrough era)

    The Civil War created the commercial embalming industry almost overnight. Army surgeons and civilian contractors, including Dr. Thomas Holmes, developed arterial injection techniques using zinc chloride and later arsenic-based solutions that could preserve a body for railroad transport across the country. President Lincoln's state funeral in April 1865, with a preserved and publicly viewable body transported over twelve days and more than a thousand miles from Washington to Springfield, demonstrated the technology to millions of Americans and created consumer demand that outlasted the war. By the 1870s, formaldehyde replaced arsenic as the primary preservation chemical. The undertaker who could embalm could command a premium and hold the body for extended arrangements, changing the economic structure of the service completely.

    Effect on the work

    Embalming created the rationale for a dedicated commercial funeral establishment distinct from the family home. By enabling multi-day viewing and long-distance transport, it transformed the undertaker from a logistics coordinator into a licensed technical professional, raising the entry barriers and the economic value of the role.

  • Mortuary science schools and state licensing (professionalization era)

    In 1882, two things happened simultaneously: the National Funeral Directors Association was founded, and the first school of mortuary science opened in the United States. Virginia enacted the first state embalming licensing law in 1894; by 1900, many states had similar statutes. The licensed funeral director who had completed formal mortuary science training and passed a state board examination became the standard professional figure by the early twentieth century. Dedicated funeral homes with purpose-built preparation rooms, chapels, and reception spaces replaced the furniture shop and the family parlor as the standard death-care venue. The manager's tools were the telephone, the ledger book, the preparation room, and the hearse fleet, all organized around a professional identity defined by licensing and state oversight.

  • Consumer muckraking and FTC regulatory pressure (Mitford era)

    Jessica Mitford's 1963 exposé "The American Way of Death" documented systematic price opacity, upselling of unnecessary services, and the manipulation of grief to inflate revenues, catalyzing a two-decade legislative and regulatory response. The Rule mandated written General Price Lists that must be provided to anyone who inquires in person, itemized pricing for all goods and services, and specific disclosure language in contracts. The funeral home manager's compliance role was permanently expanded: maintaining accurate GPL documentation, training staff on disclosure requirements, and managing the FTC compliance audit trail became standing operational obligations that exist to this day.

    Effect on the work

    The Funeral Rule did not reduce employment, but it restructured the economics of funeral service toward transparency. By 1999, compliance was "very high" per the Government Accountability Office. The Rule shifted competitive dynamics from opacity-based upselling toward service quality and relationship differentiation.

  • Funeral home management software (FDMS 1981, computer-era records)

    The Funeral Director's Management System (FDMS), first designed in 1981, was the earliest computerized case management solution for funeral homes, moving death certificate tracking, case file management, and pricing records off paper ledgers and onto early personal computers. Through the 1980s and 1990s, competing platforms (Osiris Software, SRS Computing, later Passare) spread throughout the industry, automating death certificate workflow, state filing reminders, inventory management, and financial reporting. For the funeral home manager, computerized case management reduced the clerical overhead of running a death-certificate-intensive, state-regulated operation and shifted the documentation responsibility from paper files to electronic records accessible from any terminal in the facility.

  • Corporate consolidation (SCI, Stewart Enterprises, Alderwoods)

    Service Corporation International, founded in Houston in 1962, pioneered the aggregation of independent funeral homes and cemeteries into a corporate portfolio, using economies of scale in embalming, procurement, and marketing to compete with family-owned operators. SCI owned more than 3,800 funeral service locations by 1999, making it by far the largest single operator in US history. Stewart Enterprises, Alderwoods Group, and Carriage Services followed similar paths. The consolidation wave restructured the funeral home manager's job in corporate-chain locations: managers became operations managers accountable to regional directors and corporate performance metrics rather than independent owners. Independent family operators, who still controlled most funeral homes by revenue in the mid-1990s, responded by emphasizing community roots and generational relationships as the differentiation the chains could not replicate.

    Effect on the work

    Consolidation did not materially reduce the total number of funeral home managers, because each acquired location still required a licensed manager in residence. But it changed the character of the role: chain managers traded ownership economics for salary and benefits stability, and the management-skill requirements shifted toward corporate compliance and multi-location coordination.

  • Online price comparison and cremation platforms (eFuneral, 2000s direct cremation)

    The internet brought price transparency to funeral service in ways the FTC Funeral Rule had never achieved. Price-comparison platforms and direct-cremation services available online from the early 2000s allowed consumers to compare itemized costs across providers and select low-cost cremation packages without visiting a funeral home. For funeral home managers, the operational response was to develop digital pricing pages (later formalized as GPL compliance tools in Passare and FuneralOne) and to adapt business models toward the higher-volume, lower-margin cremation workflow. The manager who could run hundreds of cremation cases a year profitably, needed a different operational footprint.

  • AI-assisted funeral management: obituary tools, CRM, chain-of-custody, digital memorials

    The pandemic's forced closure of in-person funeral services in spring 2020 accelerated the adoption of livestreaming, digital arrangement conferences, and online grief support resources. By 2023-2025, a wave of AI-specific tools arrived: funeral management platforms including FrontRunner Professional and Passare introduced AI obituary drafting and FTC GPL compliance automation; AI cremation chain-of-custody tracking uses QR-code scanning at every transfer point to reduce misidentification risk; and digital legacy platforms (StoryFile, HereAfter AI, Eternos) allow families to preserve and interact with AI recreations of the deceased. The manager's role is shifting from administrative executor to quality gatekeeper and grief steward, with AI absorbing the drafting, tracking, and scheduling overhead while the arrangement conference and first-call response remain irreducibly human.

    Effect on the work

    AI tools have not reduced funeral home manager headcount, but they have expanded the volume of cases a single manager can supervise. The administrative tasks most exposed to AI (obituary drafting, document routing, pre-need CRM follow-up sequences) constituted a real but non-dominant portion of the role; their partial automation has been absorbed as productivity gain rather than employment reduction.

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Funeral Home Managers employment and pay by year

On record since1840
Latest US employment13,910 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$78,790 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+4.1% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 12 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
18909,891n/aDecennial Census 1904 Researched contextReport
190016,189n/aDecennial Census 1904 Researched contextReport
196355,000$8,500Est., Overnight Caskets (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched contextReport
1984n/a$28,000Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
200027,800n/aEst., BLS OOH Researched contextReport
20199,400$76,350BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202010,010$74,200BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202112,710$74,000BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202213,680$72,110BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202314,200$75,660BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202413,120$76,830BLS OEWS May 2024 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2024 (pay) Official statisticReport
202513,910$78,790BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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