A generation ago, burial was the default and cremation the exception. Today, the roles are rapidly reversing.
By 2035, 80% of Americans will opt for cremation over burial, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.
That’s a stunning figure, considering that just 55 years ago, only 5% of people chose cremation over burial. Attitudes towards “final disposition” have undergone significant changes in recent years, and funeral directors attribute these shifts to several sweeping social factors.
“I’m seeing a big trend in choosing cremation,” said Ashley Nye, who opened Ashley D.X. Nye Funeral Home in Youngwood in 2019.
The growing preference for cremation reflects more than a change in funeral logistics. Local funeral directors say it signals a broader cultural shift, as Americans increasingly weigh cost, personal meaning and practicality over long-held traditions rooted in religion and public mourning. The result has been fewer burials, shorter or nonexistent services and a reimagining of what a funeral looks like — if one happens at all.
“I just had two people come in — one was 91, one was 92 — but they don’t even want to be buried anymore. Now they want cremation,” Nye said.
Hand-in-hand with the steep increase in cremation is a change in funeral rites and services. Regional funeral directors are also seeing an increasing number of their clients opt out of multi-day viewings, religious rituals, and — oftentimes — any kind of public event altogether.
“I see a lot of people who do what we call a direct cremation, meaning bringing your loved one into our care, filling out the death certificate, doing all the appropriate permits and forms, getting them cremated and just giving them back,” Nye said.
Ken Hoculock, 56, of Winfield Township has joined most of his family in deciding on cremation and a meaningful ceremony away from a funeral home or church.
“I’ve instructed Margie, (my wife), to cremate my remains and scatter my ashes over the Atlantic Ocean off Folly Field Beach in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where I proposed marriage to her on April 8, 2006,” he said.
Multiple factors are influencing the shift in post-death attitudes.
Death is expensive
The most obvious reason to avoid multiple viewings, an expensive casket, a cemetery plot and a large funeral service is the cost. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral with viewing and burial in 2023 cost $8,300. Joseph Cardaro, of Joseph J. Cardaro Funeral Home in New Kensington, is also seeing fewer and fewer people who have life insurance or money planned for funeral costs.
“People are not prepared like they were. Twenty or 30 years ago, when I started, everyone had insurance. Now, maybe two out of 10 have insurance,” he said.
Yahoo Finance reported that 57% of those surveyed for a Debt.com study in 2025 said that they would not be able to afford costs on their own if a loved one passed away.
Direct cremation typically involves a cost of between $1,500 and $5,000, which is a far cry from the $8,300 figure above. Cardaro said that funeral home services are “like a menu,” and anything extra added to a service will incur extra cost. Families can choose to hold a viewing or service before or after cremation, and that would mean more money.
Even a burial is costly. As Nye said, families have to pay to have graves opened and then for burial, in addition to the cost of funeral plots and any kind of grave marker. The decrease in burials is hitting cemeteries hard as well, TribLive reported last year.
Shifting attitudes towards death care
Outside of cost, there’s plenty of good reason to avoid services or big to-dos after death: changing religious affiliations, wider options and an “I don’t care, I’ll be dead” mindset that’s become more pervasive.
The covid-19 pandemic also accelerated the trend towards private or completely absent services; even after families were able to hold in-person gatherings again, fewer opted for planning a public viewing.
Fewer and fewer Americans are identifying as religious, for one. According to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, 62% of Americans identified as Christians in 2023-24, a decline of 16% since 2007. With so many funeral rites being connected to a church or religious leader, it makes sense that larger services would be deprioritized.
This trend may very well continue, as 45% of Americans aged 18-29 define themselves as Christian, as opposed to 78% of those 65 and older.
Nye said that, even amongst those who choose to have religious funerals, it has become more common to have shorter ceremonies in the funeral home as opposed to having a formal funeral Mass at a church.
“Even people who belong to a church or are affiliated with a church, they’re having their pastors coming into the funeral home,” she said.
Southwestern Pennsylvania contains a lot of Catholics — about 628,000 members in the Diocese of Pittsburgh and 135,100 in the Diocese of Greensburg — and the Catholic Church has a history with cremation that has kept practicing members from choosing it as an option in the past. While the church has allowed for this option in recent years, they still direct that cremains should be buried or entombed, not scattered or kept in personal spaces like homes of family members.
Hoculock and his brother, Heath — who influenced his decision to choose cremation — were raised Catholic. Heath died this past June and was given, as was requested, a “sea burial” in Lake Huron off of Harbor Beach, Mich.
“He was cremated and we scattered his cremains in the lake, and threw red and white roses in that area. He had said that if you die a natural death at an old age, few were going to be around to visit your grave, and that in 50 years, there would be no one. To him, the trouble and expense one goes to for a traditional earth burial is just not worth it,” Hoculock said of his brother’s arguments in the late 1990s that swayed him towards the idea of cremation.
New traditions on the rise
Also contributing to the trend of smaller and less typical funerals is the development of fresh and varied options for final disposition and services.
Dignity Memorial, a national funeral planning group, looked at current trends in its industry and found that several novel concepts were emerging. Amongst them were unique services like celebrations of life — gatherings with more positive tones than the typical funeral — and “living funerals,” which are services held while a terminally ill person is still alive so that they may experience the gathering of loved ones.
Other choices such as green burials, donating to science and the transformation of cremains into items including jewelry, records and tattoo ink are also gaining steam.
Along with creating new traditions, Americans are increasingly eschewing typical mainstays of funeral planning, such as lengthy visitations and even published obituaries. Nye and Cardaro have both noticed.
Nye said that with social media, printed obituaries can seem expensive for families. That trend goes hand-in-hand with fewer funerals; if services aren’t planned, families see less reason to publish an obituary.
“When you tell them that you can publish on your website for free, and I also have a Facebook funeral homepage … I’m telling you, nine out of 10 times, people say yes,” Nye said.