Dave Ramsey Blasts $25,000 Funeral Cost. What’s the Max You Should Pay?

A caller named Jeff from Austin, Texas, told Dave Ramsey that his mother was quoted $25,000 for a pre-paid funeral package, complete with a payment plan. The popular financial radio host didn’t hesitate to call the funeral salesman a “slickster.”

The sticker shock is especially galling given Jeff’s mother’s financial situation. She earns about $1,600 a month from Social Security and has made no end-of-life plans. The funeral home’s answer was financing at $600 a month for several years. “$600 for the next 5 years of your life?” Jeff said on air. “Yeah, I don’t even know if my mom has that amount of time.”

Ramsey kept it simple: “So, mom, you did not live your life in a Mercedes, and you shouldn’t die in a Mercedes.” Here’s his guidance on what a funeral should actually cost.

How Funeral Pricing Exploits Grief

Ramsey said the average funeral in America costs about $7,000 and recommended that most people budget $5,000 to $6,000. Costs vary widely depending on geography, whether you choose burial or cremation, and the scope of the service. According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), the median cost of a funeral with casket and burial is $8,300, while the median cost of a funeral with cremation is $6,280. Cremation is increasingly the default choice: the NFDA’s 2025 Cremation & Burial Report places the national cremation rate at 63.4% in 2025, more than double the burial rate of 31.6%, with cremation projected to reach 82.3% by 2045.

So how can a funeral home justify a $25,000 package? The answer lies in a sales process engineered around a family’s inability to negotiate while grieving. Some funeral homes rely on “bundling,” folding individual items, like a $400 photo video, into a package where each line item feels minor. The total balloons before anyone realizes what happened. The Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule requires itemized pricing, giving families the legal right to decline any individual item. Most people in grief do not know to ask.

Compliance with those rules is inconsistent. In a 2023 undercover phone sweep, FTC staff placed calls to 278 randomly selected funeral providers across the country, requesting price information. The results, published in a November 2024 report, found violations at 39 funeral homes, with the most common violation being a refusal to answer price questions over the phone. For grieving families who don’t know their rights, that information gap is expensive.

The financing offer made to Jeff’s mother compounds the damage. At $600 a month for five years, a family paying off a $25,000 funeral at a typical consumer loan rate would pay thousands more in interest on top of an already inflated principal. For someone on a fixed Social Security income, that monthly payment would consume a crushing share of take-home cash.

The Prepayment Trap Ramsey Correctly Identifies

Ramsey’s advice on prepayment is clear: “You do not prepay a funeral ever. You pre-plan a funeral, but you never prepay a funeral.” He noted that buying cemetery plots is acceptable, but handing money to a funeral home in advance is a different matter entirely.

The risk is real, and the legal framework makes it worse than most people realize. The FTC Funeral Rule governs transactions at the time of need. Pre-need contracts, where you pay for a funeral before death, are regulated almost entirely by state law, and the protections vary dramatically from state to state. Funeral homes can close, change ownership, or go bankrupt, and pre-paid funds may be inadequately protected depending on where you live. Pre-planning, by contrast, costs nothing. It means documenting your wishes, selecting a funeral home, and understanding what a basic arrangement would cost, without transferring any money.

Ramsey illustrated the opportunity cost with a blunt comparison: if you took $6,000 at age 30 and invested it, it could grow to $600,000 to $700,000. He asked, “What are you, King Tut?” The point is that locking up cash in a prepaid funeral arrangement is an expensive financial mistake with no corresponding benefit.

So What Should You Do?

Ramsey offered concrete steps for anyone in Jeff’s situation. He recommended switching to a completely different funeral home and pointed out that you can even buy a casket at Costco. Under the FTC Funeral Rule, funeral homes are legally required to accept third-party caskets without charging an additional handling fee, a right most families never use because they don’t know it exists.

For families with more time and resources, the path is straightforward: open a dedicated savings account, deposit a target of $6,000 to $8,000 over time, and document your wishes in writing. No prepayment, no financing, no bundled packages.

“There’s no gain spiritually in what you spend on a funeral,” Ramsey said. “There’s no gain for the people that are left behind that are grieving over what you spend for a funeral.” A $25,000 funeral and a $7,000 funeral produce the same outcome for the person who has passed. The difference falls on the living, in the form of debt.

Editor’s note: This article corrects the NFDA median cremation funeral cost from $6,300 to $6,280, reflecting the most recent NFDA General Price List Study data, and adds context from the NFDA’s 2025 Cremation and Burial Report showing the U.S. cremation rate reached 63.4% in 2025, as well as findings from the FTC’s first-ever undercover Funeral Rule phone sweep, whose results were published in November 2024.

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