16 CFR Part 453, in plain English.
The FTC Funeral Rule is the law that governs every General Price List in the country. Here's what it says, what's pending, and what it means for your home.
What the Rule requires (current as of May 2026).
The Funeral Rule — formally 16 CFR Part 453 — has been on the books since 1984 and was last meaningfully amended in 1994. In short, it requires every funeral home to:
- ·Give consumers a written, itemized General Price List (GPL) at the start of any in-person discussion of arrangements.
- ·Disclose the price of each good and service separately, so families can pick and choose.
- ·Disclose specific fees — Basic Services Fee, embalming, transportation, casket and outer burial container ranges — using the Rule's required language.
- ·Provide a Casket Price List and Outer Burial Container Price List before showing those items.
- ·Itemize the Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected before payment.
- ·Not condition the sale of any funeral good or service on the purchase of another, with narrow exceptions.
If you serve families, the Rule applies. There is no minimum-size exemption.
What's pending — the ANPR amendment.
In late 2022, the FTC issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) covering several potential amendments to the Funeral Rule. The headline proposals on the table:
- ·Online price disclosure. Whether funeral providers should be required to publish their GPL — and possibly their Casket Price List — online or through electronic media.
- ·Third-party fee disclosure. Whether crematory and other third-party fees should be required on the GPL.
- ·Basic Services Fee. Whether the Rule's treatment of reduced Basic Services Fees should be amended.
- ·New forms of disposition. Whether the Rule should be updated for alkaline hydrolysis, natural organic reduction, and similar.
- ·Embalming disclosure. Whether the embalming disclosure language should be modernized.
- ·Readability. Whether the Rule should require plain-language formatting of the GPL itself.
Status as of May 2026: the comment period closed January 3, 2023. A workshop was held September 7, 2023. No final rule has been issued. The FTC is currently re-upping its information-collection clearance for another three years (the current clearance expires May 31, 2026), which signals the rulemaking is ongoing.
Translation: there is no compliance deadline yet. There will be one. The homes already publishing clean, defensible GPLs — itemized, online, and forward-compatible — will not have to scramble when it lands.
What this means for your home.
You don't need to panic. You do need to stop assuming your 2019 GPL still does the job.
Three things every independent owner should do this quarter:
- Read your own GPL out loud. If a line item is unclear to you, it's unclear to a family. Fix the language.
- Pull your numbers. What's your Basic Services Fee actually covering? When did you last benchmark it regionally? If it's been more than 18 months, it's stale.
- Get forward-compatible. Assume online price disclosure is coming. Build the document you'd be proud to publish before you have to.
GPLscore is built exactly for this. The free grade flags the compliance gaps in 60 seconds. The Deep Audit gives you a 15-page document — what to keep, what to fix, what to add — calibrated against both the current Rule and the ANPR proposals.