Open your funeral home's website and go to the page you built for families. You know the one. Somebody photographed the front porch in October light, somebody argued for two weeks about whether it should say "three generations" or "four," and the copy has been rewritten more times than anybody involved will admit.
Now open your careers page. Odds are it reads close to this: must be licensed in [state], must be able to lift 100 pounds, valid driver's license, competitive salary, EOE. Forty words, maybe fifty, written once by whoever had the login that afternoon and untouched since.
One of those pages is telling the truth
The family page is what you want to be, and it took time because it mattered. The careers page is what you actually think the job is worth, and it took nine minutes because it didn't. A licensed director sitting on her couch at eleven at night, scrolling listings on her phone because she just finished her fourth night removal of the week, can tell those two apart in about four seconds.
Here is the number I keep coming back to
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual wage for morticians, undertakers, and funeral arrangers at $49,800 in May of 2024. That same year, the median wage across every occupation in the American economy, all of them together, teachers and truck drivers and shift managers and everybody else, came in at $49,500.
Three hundred dollars
That is the entire premium this profession pays for an associate's degree, a national board exam, a state license, and an apprenticeship that runs one to three years, and it doesn't begin to account for the on-call nights, the ruined Saturdays, or the part of the job where you walk into the worst day of a family's life and are expected to be the steadiest person in the room. Three hundred dollars over the median job that asks for none of it.
The bottom ten percent of licensed directors sit under $31,470. BLS lists social work as a comparable occupation, similar emotional weight and similar hours spent listening to people who are not okay, and puts the median there at $61,330.
While we're at it, let's retire a bad number
There's a statistic that floats around this profession claiming sixty percent of funeral home owners plan to retire within five years. I've seen it quoted in half a dozen places over the past couple of years, and not one of them says where it originally came from. The trail goes cold somewhere around 2021.
We don't need it. The BLS figures are free, current, and sitting on a government website you can pull up before your coffee gets cold, and an argument built on numbers your reader can verify is worth a great deal more than one built on a number everybody repeats because everybody repeats it.
Every other cost got passed along, but this one didn't
Let me concede the part that's real, because it is real.
You didn't set this market. Caskets cost more than they did five years ago, and so do fuel, insurance, vaults, urns, and everything else that shows up on a truck. Your cremation rate climbed while your average sale fell. The family down the road is price shopping direct cremation across three websites before they ever pick up the phone. Nobody is sitting on a hidden pile of margin and refusing to share it.
But look at what happened to each of those rising costs, one at a time. Every single one got passed through to the general price list, because it had to. Every one except labor.
Labor is the one line item this profession decided to absorb. Except it never really got absorbed. Your director absorbed it, out of her paycheck and her Saturdays and the sleep she didn't get, and now she works for the group nine miles down the road while you cover her calls yourself and try to work out what happened.
I never went to mortuary school because I like my sleep
Full disclosure, and it isn't a humble one.
It's no secret that I'm not a licensed funeral director. I've spent the last 35 years around this profession close enough to know how the work actually goes, and the reason I never went and got licensed had nothing to do with the bodies and nothing to do with the grief. I just didn't want the night calls. I like my sleep. That's the whole reason, and it's worth sitting with for a second, because it wasn't the hardest parts of the job that kept me out of licensure. It was the schedule.
So when somebody tells me nobody wants to do this work anymore, I know that isn't it. I wanted this work. I still do. I built an entire career standing knee deep in it. What I didn't want was a schedule nobody would design on purpose if they were starting from a blank page today.
"Nobody wants to do this work anymore" is the most expensive sentence in this profession
It's a comfortable sentence, which is exactly why it has lasted this long. It turns the shortage of licensed funeral directors into a supply problem, and a supply problem belongs to somebody else. It's the schools. It's the generation. It's the culture, or the phones, or whatever we're blaming this month. And if it belongs to somebody else, then there's nothing sitting on your desk that needs your attention.
BLS tells a different story. It projects roughly 5,800 openings a year in funeral service over the decade, and it says plainly that many of them come from replacing workers who transfer to different occupations or leave the workforce altogether.
Different occupations. Not different funeral homes.
They didn't stop wanting the work. They went and found something that pays about the same, sometimes better, and never once asks them to sit across from a widow at seven in the morning or referee two brothers fighting over a casket with their mother laid out in the next room. No boards. No license to renew. No phone at two a.m. Two years of school and three years of apprenticeship sitting unused in a drawer, and that detail is the one worth stopping on, because nobody walks away from a credential they bled for unless keeping it has started costing more than it pays.
Look at that median wage one more time and you'll see how short a walk it was.
You posted; you didn't recruit
Forty words on a careers page isn't competing for anybody. It's waiting. And you're waiting against employers who have a compensation band, a benefits sheet, a recruiter whose entire job is finding people, and a plan for the week after somebody finally says yes. They aren't better at this than you are. They're just doing it.
So here's the only homework I've got for you.
Pull up your careers page and set it next to the page you wrote for families. Read them back to back, out loud if you can stand it. If they don't sound like they came from the same funeral home, you already know the next move, and it isn't posting those same forty words again in September.