For the first five posts in this series, we've walked through what the Funeral Rule requires: price disclosure, unbundling, embalming transparency, casket protections. These are real, meaningful consumer protections. They matter.
But the Rule was written in 1982, revised in 1994, and frozen since. The funeral industry it regulates has changed fundamentally. The Rule hasn't kept up, and the gaps are not small.
This post is about what falls outside the Rule's reach. If the first five parts told you what the law protects, this one tells you where you're on your own.
The Cremation Gap
When the Funeral Rule was enacted, the national cremation rate was under 15%. The overwhelming majority of American families chose burial, and the Rule was built around that transaction: a family walks into a funeral home, selects a casket, arranges a service, and buries their dead. The GPL, the Casket Price List, the embalming disclosures, the unbundling requirements, all of it assumes a burial-centered process with the funeral home as the single point of contact.
Today, the cremation rate exceeds 60%. In some states it's above 80%. The majority of American families now choose cremation, and for many of them, the funeral home is not the centerpiece of the experience. Some families use a direct cremation provider and never set foot in a funeral home. Some receive the ashes and make no further plans for months or years. Some want to scatter, or place the ashes in a columbarium, or keep them at home, or divide them among family members, or convert them into memorial jewelry or glass art or living reefs.
None of these decisions are addressed by the Funeral Rule.
The Rule governs the initial transaction: the purchase of funeral goods and services from a funeral provider. Once the cremation is complete and the ashes are in the family's hands, the Rule's protections end. There is no federal requirement for price disclosure, informed consent, or consumer protection at the point where the family is deciding what to do with the cremated remains.
This is not a minor gap. According to industry surveys, roughly one in three families who choose cremation still have the ashes at home months or years later, not because they've made a deliberate decision to keep them, but because they didn't know what to do next and no one was there to help them figure it out.
The funeral home's job was done. The Rule's protections were over. And the family was left holding an urn with no roadmap.
Cemeteries
The Funeral Rule applies to funeral providers, which the regulation defines as entities that sell both funeral goods and funeral services to the public. Most cemeteries are not funeral providers under this definition. They sell burial plots, grave liners, memorial markers, and interment services, but they typically do not sell the full range of funeral goods and services that triggers Funeral Rule coverage.
This means that when a family purchases a burial plot, a niche in a columbarium, or a marker from a cemetery, the transaction is not governed by the Funeral Rule. There is no federal requirement for the cemetery to provide a GPL, to itemize its prices, to permit third-party purchases, or to disclose that alternatives exist.
Some cemeteries are transparent about their pricing. Many are not. Families who have just navigated the funeral home's GPL process with some degree of informed choice may find themselves in a completely unregulated transaction at the cemetery, where pricing is opaque, bundling is common, and there is no federal mechanism requiring disclosure.
State laws vary. Some states regulate cemetery pricing and practices. Others defer largely to the market. The result is a patchwork in which the level of consumer protection a family receives depends on where they live and which cemetery they're dealing with.
Pre-Need Sales
Pre-need funeral arrangements are contracts purchased before a death occurs. They are a significant part of the funeral industry's revenue, and they are largely regulated at the state level, not the federal level.
The Funeral Rule does apply when a consumer begins discussing funeral arrangements with a provider, including pre-need discussions. The GPL must be offered. But the specific financial instruments used in pre-need sales, the trust accounts, the insurance policies, the price guarantees, the cancellation terms, are governed by state law, not the Funeral Rule.
This matters because pre-need contracts involve unique consumer risks. Families who purchase pre-need may be locking in prices decades in advance. They may be doing so with a provider that could change ownership, close, or be acquired by a larger company before the contract is ever used. The trust or insurance funding the contract may or may not fully cover the costs at the time of need.
The FTC has acknowledged these gaps. The 2022 ANPR asked for public comment on whether the Funeral Rule should be expanded to address pre-need sales more comprehensively. No such expansion has been adopted.
Online Purchasing
The Funeral Rule was written for in-person and telephone transactions. It requires the GPL to be provided during in-person discussions and price information to be shared over the phone.
It says nothing about websites.
A funeral home is not required by federal law to post its GPL, its prices, or any pricing information on its website. A family that wants to comparison-shop from home, using the same device they use to compare prices for every other major purchase in their lives, has no federal right to see funeral prices online.
This has been the most debated issue in every Funeral Rule review cycle since 2019. The FTC's 2022 ANPR asked whether online price posting should be mandatory. Consumer groups overwhelmingly supported the idea. Industry associations opposed it, arguing that pricing is too complex to present online without context and that mandatory posting would create compliance burdens for small providers.
As of this writing, no online posting requirement exists. The Rule remains an analog regulation in a digital world.
New Forms of Disposition
When the Rule was written, the choices were burial and cremation. Today, families in a growing number of states can choose alkaline hydrolysis (sometimes called water cremation or aquamation), natural organic reduction (human composting), conservation burial, and other emerging methods.
The Rule does not address these methods. Its definitions, its disclosure requirements, and its price list structures are built around burial and cremation. A family choosing alkaline hydrolysis has the same right to a GPL from a provider who offers that service, but the Rule's specific protections, the embalming disclosures, the alternative container requirements, the casket provisions, were not designed with these methods in mind.
As new forms of disposition become legal in more states and more families choose them, the gap between what the Rule covers and what the market offers will continue to widen.
The Post-Disposition Gap
This is the gap Bespoke Undertakings was built to address.
After the funeral or cremation is complete, families face a second set of decisions that are just as significant as the first: where should the remains rest permanently? What kind of memorial is appropriate? How do you navigate cemetery options, scattering regulations, columbarium availability, or the logistics of transporting ashes to another state or country?
There is no GPL for these decisions. There is no federal disclosure requirement. There is no unbundling mandate. The family is making consequential choices, often involving significant costs, in an unregulated space with no standardized information.
Some families figure it out. Many don't. The result is the phenomenon we see every day: families with ashes at home, not because they've chosen to keep them permanently, but because the system that guided them through the first set of decisions disappeared before the second set began.
We built BU to be the guide for that second set of decisions. Not a funeral home. Not a crematory. Not a cemetery. A service that begins where the existing system ends and helps families find something permanent, personal, and worthy of the person they lost.
The Funeral Rule protects families during the purchase. Nothing protects them after.
What Comes Next
In Part 7, we'll look at the price transparency debate head-on: online pricing, the FTC's telephone sweep, and the ongoing argument about whether families should be able to see funeral costs before they pick up the phone.