What the Law Requires a Funeral Director’s Website to Show

A funeral director’s website is one of the few small-business websites in the UK that carries direct legal obligations about what it must display, and where. Since September 2021 the Competition and Markets Authority has required specific price information to be published online. Since March 2025, firms in Scotland are also inspected against a statutory code.

Most independent funeral homes we look at are somewhere between partially compliant and unaware there is anything to comply with. This is a plain explanation of what the published rules actually say, the design problem one of them creates, and how to satisfy both the regulator and the family reading the page at two in the morning.

It is not legal advice. Every requirement below is quoted or cited so you can check it against the source and confirm your own position.

There are two sets of rules, and they do different jobs

The Funerals Market Investigation Order 2021 applies across the UK. It is about price transparency and commercial disclosure, and it says specific things about your website.

The Funeral Director Code of Practice applies in Scotland only, came into force on 1 March 2025, and is about standards of care and conduct. It says less about websites directly, but what it does say about communication changes how the site should be written.

A Scottish independent is subject to both.

What the CMA Order requires your website to show

The Order was published in June 2021 and phased in, with full compliance required from 16 September 2021. It applies to all funeral directors. Firms with four or fewer branches get reduced financial reporting obligations — not reduced price-display obligations. If you are a two-branch independent, the website rules apply to you in full.

The Standardised Price List

You must display a Standardised Price List “clearly and prominently in your branch window, inside the branch, and online (if you have an online presence)”.

The online part is more specific than most people realise. The CMA’s guidance for funeral directors with four or fewer branches states that it:

Three separate conditions sit in that sentence, and sites fail on each of them:

• A PDF. Not a web page on its own, not an image, not a paragraph of prices in your services copy.
• Separate to all other information. Not a PDF brochure with the price list on page seven.
• One link from the home page. Not three clicks down under Services → Our Funerals → Costs.

What has to be in it

The list must cover the attended funeral, the unattended funeral if you offer one, and certain additional products and services, with separate prices for each of the individual items that make up the attended funeral. Those individual prices must be greater than zero and must add up to the total attended funeral price — so you cannot list components at £0 and recover the money in the headline figure.

The Additional Options Price List

A second, itemised list covering everything you offer that is not in the Standardised Price List — coffins, flowers, additional transport and so on. Prices here can be fixed amounts, “starting from” figures or ranges.

The disclosures people forget

• The Ultimate Owner of the business. A sole trader gives their trading name; a corporate structure discloses the parent and registered companies. This is the one that catches firms which have been acquired but kept the family name over the door.
• Any business or material financial interest in a comparison website.
• A register of material charitable donations.

The CMA is not treating this as a formality

In January 2023 the CMA wrote that its monitoring had “revealed that some businesses are only partially compliant and in some cases, have made no effort at all to comply with their legal obligations”.

That was over three years ago. If your price list is a scanned photograph of a laminated sheet, or lives four clicks down, or does not exist online because the site was built before 2021 and nobody revisited it, that is the category being described.

The design problem the Order creates — and the honest way round it

Here is the tension nobody in the trade press says out loud. The Order requires a PDF, one click from the homepage. A PDF is a poor way to give a grieving family price information on a phone at midnight. It downloads, it opens in a separate viewer, it is usually laid out for A4, and it pinches and zooms badly on a small screen.

And the common shortcut — publishing the price list as a scanned image or a photograph of a printed sheet — is worse in every direction at once. It is unreadable to a screen reader, invisible to search engines, impossible to select or copy, hopeless on a phone, and a nuisance to keep current, so it quietly goes out of date.

That gives you a compliant artefact and a usable one. The HTML version is readable by screen readers, legible on a phone without zooming, indexable, and — the practical benefit — editable in a minute when a price changes, rather than requiring someone to rebuild a document and re-export it.

Two cautions, because this is exactly the sort of advice that gets repeated carelessly. The HTML page does not replace the PDF requirement, and the two must always say the same thing. A website showing one set of prices and a PDF showing another is worse than either alone.

Scotland’s additional layer, live since 1 March 2025

If you carry out the functions of a funeral director in Scotland, the Funeral Director Code of Practice applies to you. It came into force on 1 March 2025, alongside inspection regulations made under the same Act.

The duty is statutory, not advisory. Section 97 of the Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act 2016 says:

The Code applies to “all funeral directors carrying out the functions of a funeral director in Scotland regardless of where their business is based” — so a firm based in England arranging funerals in Scotland is within scope. Inspectors “carry out inspections against the requirements set out in the Code” and also investigate serious or significant complaints.

The parts that change how a website should be written

Most of the Code is about care of the deceased and conduct of the arrangement, not about web pages. Two provisions, though, bear directly on your published content.

Transparency about what you do not offer. The Code expects funeral directors to be transparent about the goods and services they offer, and where a person asks about something the firm does not provide, “it is expected that the funeral director makes that clear and makes the person aware that those services can be accessed elsewhere”.

On a website, that is an argument for stating plainly what you do not do — a service you do not conduct, a type of coffin you do not supply, a religious or cultural rite you are not the right firm for. Almost every funeral website lists only what the firm offers and leaves the gaps to be discovered on the phone.

Plain language. The Code requires that “all written and verbal communication must be clear and in plain language, avoiding jargon”. Written communication includes what you publish. A site that talks about “bespoke bereavement provision” and “professional service fees” without saying what either means is not meeting the spirit of that, and is failing the reader regardless.

A website checklist you can run this afternoon

Open your own site on a phone and work down this list. It takes about ten minutes.

• 1. Is the Standardised Price List reachable in one link from the homepage?
• 2. Is it a PDF, separate from all other information — not a page in a brochure?
• 3. Is it real text rather than a scan or photograph?
• 4. Does it show the attended funeral, the unattended funeral if you offer one, and the itemised components?
• 5. Do the itemised prices each exceed zero and add up to the attended total?
• 6. Is there an Additional Options Price List covering everything else you sell?
• 7. Is the Ultimate Owner of the business disclosed?
• 8. Are the prices on the site the prices you are actually charging today?
• 9. Is there an accessible HTML version alongside the PDF, saying exactly the same thing?
• 10. Can someone read it on a phone without pinching and zooming?
• 11. Is the language plain enough that a distressed reader understands it first time?
• 12. Does the site say what you do not offer, and where it can be found instead?

Any item you fail is fixable, and most are an afternoon’s work rather than a rebuild. Item 1 in particular is usually a navigation change, not a new website.

The rules are the floor, not the job

Compliance gets you to the point where you are not doing anything wrong. It does not address the thing that actually decides whether a family calls you.

Most first visits to a funeral home’s website happen on a phone, often late, often by someone who has never arranged a funeral and does not know what any of it costs or how it works. Meeting them well is a separate discipline from meeting the Order, and we have written about it at length on our funeral directors page — brochure sites that cannot take an enquiry, enquiries that die in a shared mailbox, the same family details re-typed four times.

The two are related, though, in one useful way: publishing your prices clearly is both a legal obligation and the single most reassuring thing you can do for someone who is frightened of asking.

If the arrangement side is the real problem

A website does not fix the office, and it would be dishonest to sell it as if it did. Where the difficulty is running the arrangements themselves, that is a different purchase. Berevia is our funeral management system for independents — £120 per month standalone, with discounted package pricing for clients combining it with a website or wider systems work, and no charge per funeral. There is a demonstration you can open and use. It is not a requirement of anything else here.

Sources and method

Every requirement above is taken from official published sources, checked against the live pages before publication:

• CMA guidance: funeral directors with 4 or fewer branches — the PDF, one-link-from-the-homepage and price-list content requirements, and the Ultimate Owner disclosure.
• The Funerals Market Investigation Order 2021 and the CMA’s funeral directors and crematorium operators guidance.
• Helping businesses comply with the Funerals Order, CMA, 27 January 2023 — the partial-compliance finding.
• Funeral Director Code of Practice, Scottish Government — scope, legal basis and inspection.
• Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act 2016, section 97 — the statutory duty to comply.

What this post does not do. It is not legal advice and it is not a complete statement of the Order, which contains obligations beyond the website. We have not quantified how many funeral websites are non-compliant, because no current figure exists that we could verify — the CMA’s published wording is qualitative and we have quoted it as such rather than turning it into a statistic. Dates and requirements are as they stand on the date above; check the linked sources rather than relying on this summary indefinitely, and confirm your own position with the CMA or your trade association.

Questions funeral directors ask us

We have four branches. Do the website rules apply to us?

Yes. The reduced obligations for firms with four or fewer branches relate to financial reporting. The price display requirements apply to all funeral directors.

Can we publish the price list as a web page instead of a PDF?

The guidance specifies a PDF, separate from other information and one link from the homepage. Publish an HTML version as well, by all means — it is better for families and for search — but not instead of the PDF.

Our price list is a scanned image. Is that a problem?

Practically, yes. A scan cannot be read by a screen reader, cannot be searched, and is difficult to read on a phone. It is also the format most likely to drift out of date. Replace it with a proper PDF and a matching web page.

Does the Scottish Code apply if our business is registered in England?

The Code applies to all funeral directors carrying out the functions of a funeral director in Scotland “regardless of where their business is based”.

Will publishing prices mean we compete on price alone?

It is the most common objection and it has not borne out. Families comparing funeral directors are mostly trying to find out whether they can afford one at all. Firms that answer that question plainly get the call; firms that make it hard to find are frequently assumed to be expensive.

Does any of this need a new website?

Usually not. Most of the twelve items above are navigation, content and file changes. If someone quotes you for a rebuild on the strength of a compliance gap, ask them which specific item requires it.