There is exactly one federal regulation in the United States designed specifically to protect you when you're buying funeral goods and services. One.
It's called the Funeral Rule. The Federal Trade Commission enacted it on April 30, 1984. It was revised once, in 1994. It has not been substantively updated since.
In the four decades since the Rule took effect, the internet was born. The cremation rate in America rose from under 15% to over 60%. Entire new forms of disposition (alkaline hydrolysis, natural organic reduction, human composting) emerged. Consumers went from comparing prices by walking into a building to comparing prices on a phone in their pocket.
The Rule still assumes you'll walk into a building.
If you're a family arranging a funeral, this regulation is the only federal law standing between you and an unregulated transaction at one of the most vulnerable moments of your life. If you're a funeral professional, this regulation defines the floor of your disclosure obligations every time you sit down with a family.
Either way, it deserves more than a passing glance.
What the Funeral Rule Actually Does
The Funeral Rule, formally known as the Trade Regulation Rule on Funeral Industry Practices (16 CFR Part 453), requires funeral providers to do three core things:
Disclose prices clearly and proactively. When you begin discussing funeral arrangements, the provider must hand you a General Price List (GPL), an itemized document showing every good and service they offer, with individual prices. They must also provide a Casket Price List and an Outer Burial Container Price List before you look at those items. And if you call on the phone, they must give you price information verbally.
Let you choose only what you want. The Rule requires unbundling. A funeral provider cannot force you to buy a package. You have the right to select individual items and services. The provider must include a statement on the GPL telling you so.
Tell the truth about what's required. The Rule prohibits misrepresenting legal requirements. A provider cannot tell you embalming is required by law when it isn't (in most circumstances, it isn't). They cannot tell you a casket is required for cremation (it isn't; an alternative container must be made available). They cannot charge you a handling fee for a casket you purchased elsewhere.
That's it. Three obligations. Disclosure, choice, and honesty. The entire federal consumer protection framework for a $7,000 to $12,000 purchase fits on a few pages of the Code of Federal Regulations.
Why It Was Created
The FTC didn't wake up one morning and decide to regulate funeral homes. The Rule was the product of years of investigation. In the late 1970s, the FTC received over 9,000 public comments and conducted 52 days of hearings across six cities, during which 315 witnesses testified across more than 14,000 pages of transcript.
What the Commission found was straightforward: families making funeral arrangements were operating at an enormous disadvantage. The emotional weight of grief, the lack of readily available pricing information, and the time pressure of needing to act quickly meant that consumers could not effectively comparison-shop or push back on costs. Providers, meanwhile, had every incentive to bundle goods and services together in ways that made it difficult for families to understand what they were actually paying for.
The Rule was designed to correct that imbalance: not by regulating what funeral homes could charge, but by ensuring that families could see what they were being charged, item by item, before they committed.
The Rule That Time Forgot
Here's where the story gets interesting, and where this series will spend most of its time.
Since 1994, the FTC has initiated three separate review cycles to determine whether the Funeral Rule needs updating. Each time, the process followed a similar arc: the Commission opened a public comment period, received input from consumers and the industry, and then... stopped.
The first review began in 1999 and concluded in 2008 with a decision to retain the Rule as-is. The second review was designated for 2019 but was delayed by COVID-19, ultimately producing a 2022 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) that asked for comment on 22 separate issues, including whether funeral providers should be required to post prices online. That ANPR generated over 700 comments and a public workshop in September 2023. As of this writing, no proposed rule has followed. A third cycle is not expected until approximately 2030.
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office raised concerns about the Rule's enforcement as far back as 1999. In report GGD-99-156, the GAO found that the FTC did not always take action when potential violations were identified during compliance sweeps, and did not consistently document the reasons for its enforcement decisions. More than 25 years later, the most recent enforcement action was a round of warning letters sent to 39 funeral homes in January 2024 following a telephone pricing sweep. It was the FTC's first such sweep in the Rule's history.
The math is worth noting. There are approximately 19,000 funeral homes in the United States. The FTC has inspected roughly 2,900 over the program's nearly 30-year history. At that pace, any given funeral home could expect to be checked about once a century.
None of this means the Rule is useless. It means the Rule is under-resourced, under-enforced, and out of date, three problems that compound each other.
What This Series Will Cover
Over the next nine posts, we're going to walk through the Funeral Rule in detail: what it requires, what it doesn't, and where the gaps are. Here's what's ahead:
Part 2: The General Price List. Your most powerful tool as a consumer, and the document most families never know to ask for.
Part 3: The Right to Choose. Unbundling, the non-declinable fee, and why you can (and should) pick only what you need.
Part 4: Embalming. When it's required, when it's not, and what the Rule actually says about disclosure.
Part 5: Caskets, Containers, and Shopping Around. Third-party caskets, alternative containers, and your right to bring your own.
Part 6: What the Rule Doesn't Cover. Cremation-first families, post-disposition decisions, cemeteries, and the growing space between 1994 regulation and 2026 reality.
Part 7: Price Transparency in 2026. Online pricing, phone sweeps, and the debate the industry is still having about whether you should be able to see costs before you call.
Part 8: State vs. Federal. Where the Funeral Rule ends and your state's laws begin.
Part 9: The Rule's Future. Deregulation, court decisions, and what happens when a rule stops evolving.
Part 10: What We'd Tell the FTC. Our perspective on where the Rule should go next.
Who This Series Is For
If you're a family who has cremated remains at home and you're wondering what comes next, this series won't answer that question directly (that's what BU does). But it will help you understand the regulatory landscape that shaped the decisions you've already made and the ones you haven't made yet.
If you're a funeral professional who wants a plain-language refresher on the Rule's requirements, one that doesn't read like a compliance manual, this is for you.
If you're a consumer advocate, a regulator, a journalist, or just someone who thinks that a 42-year-old consumer protection rule governing a multi-billion-dollar industry deserves more public scrutiny: welcome.
We believe informed families make better decisions. We also believe good funeral professionals have nothing to fear from informed families. Those two convictions drive everything BU does, and they'll drive this series.