How Much Is a Funeral Home Worth? Valuation Multiples and What SBA Lending Data Shows (2026)
Short answer: independent funeral homes are priced as a multiple of earnings, and the published ranges run wide. Published ranges start near 3x EBITDA for a small owner-operated firm and run past 8x for the large regional operations consolidators bid on. The spread is that wide because two funeral homes with identical revenue can have completely different call volumes, cremation mixes, buildings and owner workloads. This guide covers what moves the number, what each published source actually says, and then adds 2,580 SBA loan records, which are the only funeral-home-level financial evidence anyone can check without the owner's permission.
One framing note before the numbers. Almost no independent funeral home is publicly listed for sale, so there's no price feed to check. NFDA counts 15,401 funeral homes operating in the United States, roughly 75% of them family- or privately owned. Valuations in this industry come from appraisers and consolidator offers, and the buyer who understands the drivers walks into that conversation with an edge.
What a funeral home is valued on
Call volume. Annual case count is the first number any appraiser asks for. Alan Creedy of Creedy & Co., a funeral home consulting firm, lists volume above 300 calls a year as a factor that pushes the multiple up and volume below 300 as one that pushes it down. Volume matters more than revenue because it measures market share, and market share in death care is sticky. Families go back to the firm that served them last time.
Average revenue per call. Two firms with 150 calls can gross very different amounts depending on their service mix and pricing. Revenue per call also captures how much of the business is full-service burial versus direct cremation.
Cremation mix. NFDA's 2025 Cremation & Burial Report projects the U.S. cremation rate at 63.4% in 2025, reaching 82.3% by 2045. Cremation cases typically produce less revenue per call than burials, so a firm with a high and rising cremation share earns a lower multiple on the same case count. Creedy & Co. names high cremation rates explicitly as a factor that drags the multiple down.
Real estate. Most funeral homes own purpose-built property, and the building often represents a large share of the total deal value. Whether the real estate is included in the price, carved out and leased back, or sold separately changes the headline number completely. Always ask which structure a quoted multiple assumes.
Owner involvement. A licensed owner who directs every service, embalms and answers the night phone is a large part of the earnings. Replacing that labor costs real money, and appraisers adjust earnings down for it. A firm with a licensed managing director already on staff sells for more than one where the seller is the operation.
The multiples buyers and consolidators pay
The published ranges, quoted the way their authors state them:
| Source | Metric | Range | Applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creedy & Co. | EBITDA | 4x to 6.5x | Typical firms, ~5x for an unremarkable one |
| Creedy & Co. | EBITDA | ~8x to 8.5x | Firms above $10M revenue |
| Johnson Consulting Group | EBITDA | 6x to 10x | Mid-to-large businesses |
| Peak Business Valuation | SDE | 1.99x to 3.22x | Funeral homes Peak has valued |
| Peak Business Valuation | EBITDA | 2.77x to 4.08x | Same population |
| Peak Business Valuation | Revenue | 0.57x to 0.99x | Same population |
Don't average those rows. They describe different slices of the market. Peak reports averages across the funeral homes it has valued, and its SDE row is the one an individual buyer usually ends up using. Creedy's 4 to 6.5x is the middle, and he names 5x as the number he'd expect on a decent but unremarkable firm. The 6 to 10x from Johnson Consulting and Creedy's 8 to 8.5x ceiling sit at the top, where a firm clears $10M in revenue. Johnson Consulting is explicit that its number moves with the economy, lending rates, case volume, market share and historical trends.
The gap between a 2.5x SDE deal and an 8x EBITDA deal is the whole game for a buyer. Consolidators pay the top multiples for high-volume firms at scale. The community firm doing 120 calls a year in a smaller metro trades far below that, and it's usually available only to the buyer who found the owner first. Our off-market funeral home sourcing guide covers how that finding actually works.
What SBA lending data shows
Public data never reports what a funeral home sold for. It does report what banks lent against funeral homes, loan by loan, in the SBA's 7(a) and 504 FOIA files. Scouly's dataset counts 2,580 funeral home borrowers. Their peak loan sizes:
| Metric | SBA loan size |
|---|---|
| 25th percentile | $367,000 |
| Median peak loan | $697,250 |
| 75th percentile | $1,370,000 |
| Share of borrowers over $1M | 36% |
Be careful with what these numbers are. They're loan amounts. A loan understates the transaction behind it, since deals get done with equity injections and seller notes stacked on top of the bank debt, and some of these loans funded buildings or renovations instead of acquisitions. So treat the table as a financeability floor. A bank underwrote a median of $697,250 against these firms, and more than a third of borrowers carried over $1M. Among Scouly's seven tracked verticals, funeral homes have the largest median loan, ahead of veterinary at $632,000 and manufacturing at $558,000. That ranking fits an industry where the building sits on the same balance sheet as the business.
SBA 7(a) is the standard acquisition instrument on the buyer's side. The 10% equity injection rules and the full-standby seller note that can cover half of it are laid out in our guide to using an SBA 7(a) loan to buy a business.
Benchmark a specific deal
Multiples tell you what the market pays per dollar of earnings. The SBA distribution tells you where a specific dollar figure sits among real bank-financed funeral homes. Scouly's free deal benchmark tool does the second part: enter an asking price or loan amount and it places the number against the 2,580-borrower funeral home distribution and the state-level SBA data. A $500,000 deal lands between the 25th percentile and the median. A $1.5M deal sits above the 75th percentile of what banks have actually financed in this vertical.
Where the off-market inventory is
Scouly tracks 3,384 funeral homes across the United States from public records, browsable on the funeral homes for sale hub. None of them is listed for sale. Each one has a verifiable footprint in SBA files, PPP records, state registries or mapped establishment density. That is exactly the population the valuation methods above apply to.
The small state markets are worth a look precisely because the firm count is low and the competing-buyer count is lower. Connecticut and Utah each have 44 tracked firms. New Hampshire has 16, South Dakota 14, New Mexico 13 and Rhode Island 12. In a state with a dozen funeral homes, one retiring owner is the whole opportunity that year.
A worked example
Take a hypothetical single-location firm in Hartford County, Connecticut. Assume 140 calls a year at $7,000 average revenue per call, so about $980,000 in revenue, and assume adjusted EBITDA of $220,000 after paying a fair salary for the work the owner does.
Apply Creedy's standard 4 to 6.5x range and the business is worth roughly $880,000 to $1.43M including its normal operating assets. The firm's below-300 call volume argues for the lower half of that range. If the cremation mix is above the 63.4% national rate and rising, shade lower again. If the deal includes the purpose-built funeral home property, the total rises by the building's appraised value, and the price starts looking like a $1.5M-plus transaction.
Now cross-check against the SBA table. At $1.1M of bank debt, the deal sits between the median funeral home loan of $697,250 and the 75th percentile of $1,370,000. A quarter of the 2,580 tracked borrowers sit between those two marks, so the structure is ordinary, and the benchmark tool will show the same placement instantly. That's the method. A multiple on earnings gives you the price, and the SBA distribution tells you whether a bank has seen that number before. If you're starting from zero, build an acquisition thesis for free and rank every tracked funeral home in your target geography.
Frequently asked questions
How much is a funeral home worth? A multiple of its earnings, with the range depending on size. Peak Business Valuation reports average SDE multiples of 1.99x to 3.22x across the funeral homes it has valued, Creedy & Co. cites 4 to 6.5x EBITDA for typical firms, and Johnson Consulting Group calls 6 to 10x a good range for mid-to-large businesses. Call volume, cremation mix, real estate and how much work the owner personally does all move a specific firm within those ranges.
What multiple of EBITDA do funeral homes sell for? Creedy & Co. puts the most common range at 4 to 6.5x EBITDA, with about 5x for an unremarkable business, and a ceiling near 8 to 8.5x for firms above $10M in revenue. Johnson Consulting Group cites 6 to 10x for mid-to-large firms. Peak Business Valuation, which values mostly smaller firms on seller's discretionary earnings, reports an average SDE range of 1.99x to 3.22x.
Does a funeral home valuation include the real estate? Sometimes, and the difference is large. Most funeral homes own purpose-built property, so a quoted price may bundle the building, carve it out with a leaseback, or leave it for a separate transaction. Before comparing any deal to a published multiple, confirm which structure the number assumes. SBA 504 loans finance the purchase, construction or renovation of buildings and land, so property-inclusive deals show up in that half of the lending data.
How does the cremation rate affect a funeral home's value? Cremation cases generally produce less revenue per call than burials, so a high or fast-rising cremation share lowers the earnings the multiple gets applied to, and Creedy & Co. lists high cremation rates as a factor that lowers the multiple itself. NFDA projects the national rate at 63.4% for 2025, headed to 82.3% by 2045, so every buyer should model the trend.
What does SBA loan data say about funeral home prices? It gives loan sizes, which work as a financeability floor. Across 2,580 funeral home borrowers in the SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA files, the 25th percentile peak loan is $367,000, the median is $697,250 and the 75th percentile is $1,370,000, with 36% of borrowers above $1M. Actual purchase prices run higher than loans because equity and seller notes stack on top.
How do I estimate a funeral home's value before contacting the owner? Public records get you part way. Registry filings show longevity, SBA files show what a bank was willing to lend, PPP records bracket the payroll, and mapped establishment density shows how crowded the local market is. No public source reports call volume or earnings, so a pre-contact estimate is a range built from local case-volume reasoning and the published multiples, checked against Scouly's deal benchmark. The precise number comes only from the owner's books.