Cremation Fees Paid in Full, £1,000 for Everything Else

If the Funeral Expenses Payment came through and still left you looking at a bill you cannot cover, you have run into the way the scheme is built rather than a mistake in your claim. The payment does not cover the funeral. It covers the burial or cremation fees in full, and then it caps almost everything else — the funeral director's professional charges, the coffin, the cars, the flowers — at a single flat sum that has not risen since April 2020. That is where the gap comes from, and for most families it is a wide one.

The short version of who fills that gap is uncomfortable: you do, or the estate does if there is money in it. The Funeral Expenses Payment was never designed to pay for a whole funeral. It was designed to stop the unavoidable fees — what the crematorium or cemetery charges — from falling on someone who is already on a low income, and to make a limited contribution to the rest.

This page sets the capped part of the payment against what a simple funeral now costs, so you can see how big the shortfall really is and where the money to close it is expected to come from.

What the payment covers in full, and what it caps

It helps to split the Funeral Expenses Payment into two halves, because they behave completely differently. The first half is the "necessary" costs, and these are met in full: the burial or cremation fees themselves, certain documents and medical certificates the funeral needs, and reasonable travel. There is no cap on this half, which is the part of a funeral nobody can avoid or shop around on.

The second half is everything a funeral director actually charges you for — their professional services, the coffin, moving and caring for the person who died, the hearse, the flowers, the order sheets, the wake. All of that is lumped together as "other funeral expenses", and the whole lot is met only up to a fixed cap. On a typical funeral this second half is the larger figure, so capping it is what produces the shortfall people write to us about.

Because the two halves are treated so differently, the same total bill can leave two families with very different gaps depending on how much of it was crematorium fees and how much was the funeral director's own charges. Understanding which side of the line each cost falls on is the first step to seeing where your gap came from.

A useful way to picture it: on a typical attended cremation, the crematorium's own fee is often the smaller part of the bill and the funeral director's professional charges the larger. The state meets the smaller, unavoidable part in full and caps the larger, more variable part — which is precisely the wrong way round for a family hoping the payment would do most of the work. The more you spend on the funeral director's side, the wider your gap grows, because none of that extra is matched once the cap is reached.

The £1,000 cap that has not moved since April 2020

For deaths on or after 8 April 2020, the cap on other funeral expenses was raised to £1,000, up from the £700 it had been before. It has stayed at £1,000 ever since. That single frozen figure is the heart of the problem: it was set before several years of rising prices, and it has not been increased to keep pace with them.

Source: gov.uk, Get help with funeral costs (Funeral Expenses Payment): What you'll get, HM Government, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

A thousand pounds does not go far against a funeral director's professional fees alone, which on most attended funerals exceed it before a coffin or a car is added. So even a family that qualifies for everything the scheme offers, and has the crematorium fees paid in full, is routinely left to find several hundred pounds and often much more. We have set out how the cap works, and why it bites the way it does, in more detail in our note on the £1,000 cap inside the DWP funeral payment.

What a simple funeral actually costs now

To see the size of the gap you have to put the frozen cap next to a real price, and the price has not stood still. The SunLife Cost of Dying report tracks the cost of a basic funeral in the UK each year, and across the period since the cap was last changed it has recorded steady increases rather than any pause. The direction of travel is the point: the cap froze, and the cost of the thing it is meant to help pay for did not.

Source: SunLife, Cost of Dying Report (annual), cited as the reference for the trend in UK funeral costs.

Even the cheaper options have moved. A simple attended funeral — a modest service, a basic coffin, one car — still carries a funeral director's fee that outstrips the £1,000 cap on its own. An unattended or direct cremation, where there is no service and no mourners at the crematorium, is the one route that can sometimes be brought close to what the payment covers, which is why families on the tightest budgets are increasingly choosing it. It is a hard choice to be nudged into by cost, and worth naming honestly rather than pretending the payment stretches further than it does.

Who is expected to fill the gap

The balance above what the Funeral Expenses Payment covers is owed by whoever contracted with the funeral director — the person who signed the paperwork and accepted responsibility for the bill. That is worth pausing on, because it is not necessarily the person the estate will ultimately reimburse.

If the person who died left money, the estate pays the funeral before almost anything else, and the signatory is reimbursed. But if the estate is empty or tied up, the signatory is personally liable in the meantime, and if there is never enough in the estate, they are simply liable. This is why who signs matters more than families expect at the time, and why it is worth asking the funeral director, in writing, exactly what you are taking on before you sign. It is also why a working relative who was not on benefits, and so could not claim the payment, can still end up carrying the cost — the flip side of the rules that can see a claim refused because a close relative has a job.

Two practical points soften the blow while you wait. A funeral is one of the first calls on the estate — funeral costs are paid ahead of most of the deceased's other debts, so if there is anything at all in the estate, a reasonable funeral bill usually comes out of it before ordinary creditors are paid. And most funeral directors are used to families in this position: many will accept payment by instalments, or wait for the estate and any benefit payment to come through, if you tell them early rather than letting the bill go quiet. Silence is what turns a manageable debt into a demand.

One group is shut out before the gap even arises: families where nobody receives a qualifying benefit get no Funeral Expenses Payment at all, capped or otherwise. That working-family gap is its own trap, covered in no benefits, no funeral grant.

How to make the gap smaller

The cap is fixed, so the room to move is on the cost side, and there is more of it than people realise in the days after a death when they feel unable to negotiate.

• Ask for a fully itemised quote. A funeral director must give you a standardised price list. Seeing each cost separately shows you what is genuinely necessary and what is an add-on.
• Ask about their simple or unattended options. Most firms now offer a low-cost package; it is not always the first thing they mention.
• Compare crematorium and cemetery fees. These vary a great deal between local authorities, and an early-morning or off-peak slot is often cheaper than a mid-morning one.
• Ask about hardship help. Some crematoria and funeral directors run their own hardship or "simple send-off" schemes, and where a child has died, separate help exists that is not means-tested at all.

It also helps to know how the payment is actually paid. Where you have used a funeral director, the award is normally paid directly to that firm rather than to you, which means it lands against the bill without passing through your own account. That is a small comfort, but it does mean the money reaches the right place even when your own finances are stretched, and it makes an early, honest conversation with the funeral director about the balance all the more worthwhile.

If a prepaid funeral plan was in place, or someone else contributed to the cost, the payment behaves differently again — the "other expenses" element is cut to a much smaller capped figure, currently £120, because the plan is treated as already covering that ground. If that describes your situation, read why your Funeral Expenses Payment was only partial before you assume something has gone wrong.

The deadline, and pre-funding the gap

Two practical points close this off. First, do not let the shortfall distract you from the clock: the Funeral Expenses Payment has to be claimed by a fixed point, and it is the six-month deadline that runs from the funeral rather than the death. Missing it forfeits the whole payment, capped part and all.

Second, the gap this page is about is exactly the gap that pre-funding is meant to close. A modest life insurance policy or an over-50s plan is designed to pay a set sum to whoever deals with the funeral, outside the means-tested system and its frozen cap, so the bill does not land on a grieving relative's own account. It cannot promise to meet every cost, and what it pays depends on the policy terms, but it is the straightforward way to keep a funeral bill off the household left behind. If you are sorting your own affairs with this in mind, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker talk it through against your circumstances. For the wider map of state help after a death, our guide to bereavement benefits and state support pulls the pieces together.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The frozen £1,000 cap is specifically a feature of the Funeral Expenses Payment as it runs in England and Wales. Scotland does things differently. There, funeral help is the Funeral Support Payment, administered by Social Security Scotland, and its flat-rate element towards other costs is reviewed and uprated each year rather than left to stand — so the "cap has not moved" complaint does not read across in the same way. The structure is similar, with burial or cremation costs met separately, but the frozen figure is not the Scottish position.

In Northern Ireland the payment mirrors the Great Britain scheme and is administered by the Department for Communities, so the same capping of other expenses applies there. Wherever you are, the practical response to a shortfall is the same: press on the cost of the funeral itself, because the payment's ceiling is not something you can argue upward.

Frequently asked questions

What does the Funeral Expenses Payment actually cover?

Burial or cremation fees in full, necessary travel, and certain documents and medical fees, plus a capped amount for everything else, such as the funeral director's charges, coffin and flowers. That cap has stood at £1,000 since April 2020 while funeral prices have risen, which is why an award so often leaves a shortfall to find.

Who pays the rest?

Whoever contracted with the funeral director. The estate pays if it has money in it, but if not, the person who signed the paperwork is personally liable for the balance. That is why the choice of funeral, and who signs for it, matters more than families expect in the days after a death.

How can the gap be reduced?

Ask the funeral director for an itemised quote and for their simple or unattended options, compare crematorium fees between local authorities, and ask whether an early slot costs less. Some crematoria and funeral directors run hardship schemes, and separate, non-means-tested help exists where a child has died.