How I check my facts
This site helps people make decisions about death, at the worst moments of their lives. That's exactly the kind of information that must be right. Here's the full working: where every number comes from, how often it's checked, and what happens when something's wrong.
Written by Charlie · Last reviewed 4 July 2026
The rule every fact follows
Nothing appears on this site as a fact unless it can be traced to a source you could check yourself. Where a figure comes from my own front-line experience in funeral care rather than a published source, it's labelled that way openly — never dressed up as official data. And when a rule or price changes in the real world, the site changes with it: every page carries a "last reviewed" date so you can see how fresh it is.
The three tiers of source I use
Government and regulator sources: GOV.UK (benefits, registration law, the 2024 death certification reforms), mygov.scot and nidirect for Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Competition and Markets Authority (price transparency rules), the Financial Conduct Authority (prepaid plan regulation), and the NHS (care-cost rules). These decide what the law and the rules actually are. Where anything else disagrees with a Tier 1 source, Tier 1 wins.
Every cost figure on this site comes from SunLife's Cost of Dying Report — the UK's longest-running study of funeral prices, based on interviews with 100 funeral directors and around 1,500 people who organised a funeral. The current figures are from the 2026 report: direct cremation £1,628, simple attended cremation £3,518, traditional attended cremation £4,200. I sanity-check these against real Standardised Price Lists — the fixed-format price documents every UK funeral director has been legally required to publish since 2021.
I've spent 20+ years working in UK funeral care, in customer-facing roles, and some of this site's most useful content — the upsell patterns to recognise, the questions worth asking at a funeral director's desk, the typical £50–£150 charge for returning ashes — comes from that day-to-day experience rather than a published dataset. Whenever a claim on this site is my own professional judgement rather than a cited figure, the page says so directly, right next to the claim. I check those observations against published price lists where they exist.
How a fact gets onto the site
Find the primary source
Not a news article about the rule — the rule itself, on the government, regulator or original publisher's page.
Check it's current
Rules change. The September 2024 death certification reforms are the perfect example — many websites still describe the old system. Every claim is checked against the source's most recent version before publishing.
Translate it into calm English
Accuracy isn't enough — a grieving person has to be able to actually use it. Jargon gets translated, and anything that could cause needless panic (like deadlines that sound harsher than they are) is explained with its real-world softness intact.
Cite it on the page
Every guide carries a "Sources for this page" section naming exactly which source backs which claim — so you never have to take my word for anything.
Re-check on a schedule
Cost figures are refreshed when each new annual SunLife report is published (every January). Rules and benefit amounts are re-checked against their official pages regularly, and every page shows its "last reviewed" date.
Why SunLife, specifically
Funeral cost data is surprisingly thin in the UK — there's no government price register, because prices are set by thousands of independent businesses. The closest thing to a national benchmark is the SunLife Cost of Dying Report, published annually since 2014. It's the longest-running study of its kind, it's built from a genuinely large sample (around 100 funeral directors and 1,500 people who organised a funeral, interviewed each year), and it's the figure most consistently cited by journalists, comparison sites and the industry press when they need a national average. That's why it's the backbone of every cost figure on this site — not because it's the only data that exists, but because it's the most robust and most widely recognised.
It isn't perfect: it's a survey, not a census, and any single provider's price can sit above or below it. That's exactly why every cost page also points you to real Standardised Price Lists, so you're comparing SunLife's national picture against the actual quote in front of you, not treating an average as a promise.
A worked example: how a cost figure actually gets checked
To make this concrete rather than a vague promise, here's the real process behind one figure — the £1,628 UK average for direct cremation:
Start with the SunLife 2026 report
It publishes a national average for direct cremation, built from its funeral director and consumer interviews that year.
Spot-check it against real Standardised Price Lists
I pull up several published price lists from different UK providers — some specialist direct cremation firms, some general funeral directors offering it as one option — and check the SunLife figure sits in a sensible place among them, not wildly out of step.
Check it against what I see day to day
Working in the industry, I have a feel for what direct cremation quotes actually look like. If a published average felt obviously wrong against that experience, I'd flag the discrepancy on the page rather than quietly using the number anyway.
Publish it labelled, dated, and sourced
The figure appears as "UK average £1,628 — SunLife Cost of Dying Report 2026," with a link to the source, so you never have to take it on trust.
Re-check it every January
SunLife publishes a new report each year. When it does, every cost figure on this site gets updated to match, and the "last reviewed" date changes with it.
How the recommendations themselves are decided
Sourcing facts is one job; deciding what to recommend from those facts is a different one, and it deserves its own explanation. The decision tool doesn't guess or use anything like AI judgement — every recommendation follows a fixed, readable set of rules I wrote myself, based on what actually changes the right answer for someone's situation.
Three principles sit behind every branch of the tool:
Every result page has a "see exactly how I worked this out" section showing you, in your own answers, which of those rules applied to you specifically — so the logic is never hidden, even though it isn't AI-generated.
Facts are one half of trust; the other half is motive. So, plainly: I don't sell funeral services, I take no commission from any provider, there are no affiliate links anywhere on this site, and nothing you enter into the decision tool is stored or shared. Several of the tool's outcomes involve buying nothing at all — pointing you to government help, to your bank, or simply to writing your wishes down — and if that's the honest answer for your situation, that's the answer you get. The site earns nothing either way, which is precisely what lets it be honest.
One design choice worth explaining: sometimes the tool will recommend an option and caution you about it in the same breath — for example, recommending an attended service while telling you honestly that government funding probably won't cover all of it. That's not a contradiction; it's deliberate. Real situations contain tensions, and pretending otherwise is how sales funnels work, not how honest guidance works.
The corrections policy
If something on this site is wrong or out of date, I want to know more than I want to look right. Email charlie@cremationguide.co.uk with what you've spotted. Genuine errors get corrected as soon as they're verified, the "last reviewed" date gets updated, and if the error could have affected someone's decision, the correction is noted openly rather than quietly patched.
The promises, in one place:
See it in practice
Every guide carries its own sources section, and the decision tool shows its working — there's a "see exactly how I worked this out" panel on every recommendation.