Independent Funeral Director research report 2025

Funeral Solution Expert (FSE) conducted independent research of UK Funeral Directors to understand:

• How funeral directors currently engage with funeral plans (or not).
• Funeral plan sales performance and trends.
• How satisfied FDs are with levels of service from their plan provider across a range of criteria.
• What improvements they would like.
• What is most important to them in a funeral plan.
• What is their regulatory status to sell and how has it, or will it, change.
• What is their propensity to switch provider and who would they consider.
• Do they accept other funeral plan redemptions and how do they rate providers of those.
• How is direct cremation impacting business (funerals and funeral plans).
• How do they track direct cremation ‘at need’ volumes and how these are arranged by channel.
• How they feel about a range of other pressures impacting their funeral business.

This is the 5th annual survey and hence we start to see some trend data. This online survey was promoted by NAFD and by SAIF. 298 funeral directors completed, which was the 2nd highest level of participation in the 5 years we have run the survey.

The report will be provided as a PDF document in PPT format with charts and commentary. Total length of the document is 54 pages, includes high level chart summary and commentary of all question responses, and a 1,400 word FSE summary section.