How to Plan a Funeral: A Step-by-Step Guide for the First Days After a Death
How to plan a funeral, step by step: first calls, burial or cremation, choosing a funeral home, costs, the service, and the remains.
To plan a funeral, you take it in order: get a legal pronouncement of death and arrange transport of the body, decide between burial and cremation, choose a funeral home and request its General Price List, then plan the service and settle what happens to the remains. Most families make these decisions across the first three to seven days. You do not have to decide everything at once, and federal law gives you the right to buy only the goods and services you actually want.
If you are reading this in the hours after a death, the sections below follow the order decisions usually come up. You can stop at any step and pick it back up when you are ready.
What are the very first steps after someone dies?
The first task is a legal pronouncement of death. If the person died in a hospital or care facility, staff handle this. If they died at home under hospice care, call the hospice nurse. If the death was unexpected and no hospice was involved, call 911. A physician, hospice nurse, or medical examiner has to formally record the time and fact of death before anything else can proceed.
Once death is pronounced, the body needs to be transported to a funeral home, crematory, or morgue. You choose which one. There is no rule that the first funeral home you call is the one you have to keep. Families sometimes authorize an initial transfer for safekeeping and then move the body once they have compared options.
After the body is cared for, a shorter list of practical tasks follows: notify close family, find out whether the person left funeral wishes or a prepaid plan, locate any life insurance or veteran's benefits paperwork, and secure the person's home, pets, and property. Our after-death checklist breaks these early tasks into a printable sequence so nothing gets lost in the first 48 hours.
Should you choose burial or cremation?
This decision shapes cost, timeline, and most of what comes next, so it usually comes early. Cremation is now the more common choice in the United States. The National Funeral Directors Association reports a cremation rate of 61.9 percent in 2024, projected to reach 82.1 percent by 2045 (NFDA 2024 Cremation and Burial Report).
Cost is one factor. In 2023 the median cost of a funeral with viewing and burial was $8,300, while a funeral with viewing and cremation had a median cost of $6,280 (2023 NFDA General Price List Study). Burial adds the cost of a plot, a grave marker, and often a burial vault. Cremation can be paired with a full viewing and service beforehand, or with a simpler direct process, which is part of why the range is wide.
Timing differs too. Burial is often scheduled within a week. Cremation can be arranged in a similar window, though many states require a waiting period (commonly 24 to 48 hours) and authorization from the next of kin before it proceeds. If you want to understand what physically happens during cremation before you decide, our guide to the cremation process walks through each stage.
How do you choose a funeral home and read its prices?
You have more control here than most people expect, because of a federal consumer protection law.
Under the FTC Funeral Rule, any funeral home must give you a General Price List (GPL) that is yours to keep, and must give you price information over the phone if you ask (Consumer Advice, FTC). That means you can call three or four funeral homes and compare itemized prices without setting foot inside. Prices for the same services vary widely between providers in the same city, so this one phone habit can meaningfully change what you pay.
The Funeral Rule also protects you in specific ways worth knowing before you sign anything:
- You have the right to buy separate goods and services. You do not have to accept a package if you only want some of it (FTC).
- No state or local law requires a casket for cremation. A funeral home offering cremation must tell you that alternative containers are available and must make them available (FTC).
- A provider cannot refuse to handle a casket or urn you bought elsewhere, and cannot charge you a fee for doing so (FTC).
- No state law requires routine embalming for every death (FTC).
Funeral directors do genuinely useful work under real time pressure, coordinating transport, permits, the death certificate, and the ceremony itself. Reading the price list closely is not a sign of distrust. It is exactly what the law is designed to let you do.
What decisions go into the service itself?
The service is where your choices become personal. Broadly, families decide on the type of gathering, the setting, and the details that make it feel like the person.
Common formats include a traditional funeral with the body present, a memorial service held after burial or cremation, a graveside service, or a celebration of life focused on the person's story rather than a fixed liturgy. There is no single correct format. If you are drawn to something less formal, our overview of what a celebration of life involves explains how these gatherings are structured and how they differ from a traditional funeral.
Within whichever format you choose, the recurring decisions are: who officiates, where it is held, whether there is a viewing, who will speak or give a eulogy, what readings or music are included, and how you will handle an obituary and notifications. If the person held religious or cultural traditions, those often guide the timeline and the order of events, so it helps to confirm them early.
How much should you budget, and where can you save?
Set a working number before you meet with a provider. The median figures above ($8,300 for burial, $6,280 for cremation) are a useful starting point, but your total depends heavily on the choices you itemize.
A few practical levers: the casket is often the single largest discretionary cost, and you are free to buy one elsewhere. A viewing, embalming, printed materials, and limousines are separate line items you can include or decline. Direct cremation followed by a memorial you host yourself is typically the lowest-cost path, while a plot, vault, and marker push a burial higher. Writing every expected line item down in advance, in a simple budget worksheet, keeps the arrangement conference from becoming a series of on-the-spot yes-or-no decisions.
What do you do with the remains after cremation?
If you chose cremation, one question waits at the end that the funeral itself does not answer: what happens to the cremated remains. Some families bury them, some scatter them in a meaningful place, some keep them in an urn at home, and many hold onto them undecided for months or years. All of these are valid, and there is no deadline for choosing.
Solidified remains are one more option families consider at this point. Parting Stone offers solidified remains through a patented process Parting Stone pioneered that gently transforms virtually all of a person's cremated remains into 40 to 80+ smooth, holdable stones. Instead of a container of fine particles, you receive a set of stones you can hold in your hand, place on a shelf, carry with you, or share among family members so more than one person can keep part of the whole. Some families scatter a few and keep the rest.
More than 14,000 families have chosen solidified remains, and Parting Stone works with over 1,800 funeral home partners, so your funeral director may already be able to arrange it alongside the services above. For families arranging this directly, human solidification is $2,495, and fulfillment takes about 8 to 10 weeks after the cremated remains are received. It is not a replacement for burial, an urn, or scattering. It is simply another form the remains can take if being able to hold them feels right to your family.
A simple order of operations
If you want the whole plan as one ordered list, here it is:
- Obtain a legal pronouncement of death (hospital staff, hospice nurse, or 911).
- Arrange transport of the body to a funeral home, crematory, or morgue of your choosing.
- Check for prepaid plans, written wishes, insurance, and veteran's benefits.
- Decide between burial and cremation.
- Call several funeral homes and compare their General Price Lists.
- Plan the service: format, officiant, location, speakers, readings, and obituary.
- Order certified copies of the death certificate (you will need several for banks, insurers, and government agencies).
- If you chose cremation, decide what to do with the remains, in your own time.
You do not have to get every step perfect. You have federal rights, real choices at each stage, and no obligation to decide the last question quickly. When you are ready to think about keeping your person present in a form you can hold, you can learn more about solidified remains at partingstone.com or reach our team at 505-772-0634 or support@partingstone.com. There is no rush, and no wrong time to ask.
