Mortuary school enrollment is at a record — so why can't your funeral home hire?
The funeral-director shortage is real: postings sit open for most of a year, and rural seats go unfilled for two. But mortuary-school enrollment is the highest it's been since records began, and three of every four new graduates are women. The pipeline isn't the problem. Keeping people, and getting them to where the deaths are, is — and both of those are problems an owner can actually compete on.
Ask an owner and the shortage is concrete: a South Carolina funeral group told reporters its director positions have sat unfilled for up to nine months. In Eads, Colorado, Jimmy Brown — on call around the clock with his wife across three rural funeral homes — took more than two years to fill one resident director-embalmer seat, and his field estimate is that over 1,100 US funeral homes are hunting the same license. Part of why it feels like a crisis is scale: the whole licensed occupation held about 27,500 jobs in 2024 — in a trade that small, a few hundred empty seats is a drought.
The number that breaks the usual story
Here’s what the shortage narrative leaves out. The accreditor’s own annual report puts mortuary-school enrollment at 7,193 students across 58 programs — up 3.8% in a year, and the highest since ABFSE began tracking in 2010. The surge started in the pandemic, when new enrollment jumped 24% in a single year, and those students get hired almost on contact — program directors report roughly 90% job placement. The pipeline has also quietly re-composed: per the same ABFSE tables, 74.5% of 2024 graduates and 76.4% of new enrollees are women — in a trade that three generations ago was nearly all men, mostly sons of funeral home owners. People are entering funeral service at record rates. The shortage lives downstream.
While we’re correcting the record: you may have heard that “60% of new funeral directors quit within five years.” We went looking for the source, and it doesn’t exist. The traceable 60% is a retirement figure about owners — NFDA’s president told CNN that over 60% of funeral home owners expect to retire within five years — and NFDA’s broader member surveys put the five-year retirement figure near 46%. Nobody has published a real early-career attrition rate. Directors retiring at the top and graduates leaking out at the bottom are different problems with different fixes, and the blended version mis-aims both.
Why the seats stay empty anyway
The economics of the license. A director’s path runs an accredited degree, board exams, and an internship of one to three years — a multi-year, five-figure investment. What it buys, at the median, is $49,800 a year as of May 2024. And that number has barely moved: the 2021 median was $48,950 — up less than 2% in nominal dollars across three years in which prices rose by double digits. The license got more expensive to live on while costing the same to earn. Even the government’s forecasters have cooled: BLS now projects 4% growth for the coming decade, half its prior projection, with most openings replacing retirees rather than adding jobs.
The schedule. The clearest data on why new licensees leave comes from a 2025 study that interviewed 34 early-career Ohio funeral directors: on-call hours stacked on top of full business days, unpredictable scheduling that management treats as immovable, and pay the participants called “not commensurate with their workloads or their experiences and educations.” An Alabama owner said the quiet part to Marketplace back in 2016, and it hasn’t aged: “the funeral biz is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year” — while the people he was trying to hire wanted a schedule with edges. Now note who the pipeline actually is: three-quarters women, many weighing that on-call phone against childcare. The study surfaced exactly that conflict. No dataset has quantified it yet, but an owner designing schedules for the workforce of 1985 is recruiting from a quarter of the pond.
The load. One of the few studies of this workforce found 28.5% of mortuary workers met the criteria for PTSD — a 2019 Harvard master’s thesis with a self-selected sample, so hold it loosely, but it’s roughly twenty points above general-population rates. The work is heavy; that’s not new. Treating the weight as a staffing variable — something operations absorbs deliberately, instead of something each director carries alone — is.
The map. Analysts describe this labor market as defined by community size: metro funeral homes run crews big enough to share the call schedule, while a rural funeral home is offering one licensee the whole county’s midnights. Jimmy Brown’s two-year vacancy wasn’t a pay dispute. It was geography — and his eventual answer wasn’t a job board. He’s mentoring his teenage nephew.
What an owner of one to three funeral homes does with this
Compete on conditions, because that’s the actual contest. A graduate with a 90% placement rate is choosing between funeral homes, not begging for a seat — so the funeral home that wins is the one whose offer survives comparison. The trade’s own retention guidance converges on the same short list: share the on-call rotation so no one works consecutive nights and a middle-of-the-night removal earns real recovery time, be honest in the interview about how often someone is on call and what support exists after difficult calls, and put staff mental-health support inside operations rather than beside them. None of that is a raise — though the pay math above says a raise wouldn’t hurt — it’s design, and design is the lever a small operator can move faster than a corporate crew ever will.
Then build the pipeline instead of shopping it. The 2025 Ohio study’s strongest retention signal was simple: the directors who stay are overwhelmingly the ones who worked in a funeral home before mortuary school. That’s Brown’s nephew, at national scale. The part-timer on your removal team, or the young person from the gatherings families still hold who asked good questions — sponsor the degree, structure the apprenticeship, sign a stay agreement. The cost of the license is the thing that deters entry; the employer who pays it converts that barrier into loyalty.
The owner retirements underneath all this — nearly half the trade within five years, most without a succession plan — are their own story about who will own these funeral homes, and they deserve their own telling. But staffing your arrangement room doesn’t wait on it.
The shortage nobody is measuring
The industry counts who retires with real precision and counts who quits young not at all — a new licensee who leaves for a job with edges simply vanishes from the data. Which means the retention contest has no scoreboard yet, and an owner who fixes the schedule, funds a student, and shares the midnight phone is competing in space the consolidators aren’t even measuring. The tide — the retirements, the shrinking count of funeral homes — is not yours to turn. The design of the job inside your building is. The shortage reaching your arrangement room was never about too few people wanting this work. It’s about what the work asks of the people who chose it — and that part has an owner.
The funeral.link Team