Benchmarking Public Funeral Companies in 2026: SCI, Carriage, and the Park Lawn Lesson

Two companies publish real numbers about running funeral homes in America: Service Corporation International and Carriage Services. Carriage’s own FY2025 filing sizes the pair honestly: “We believe these two companies collectively represent approximately 23% of funeral and cemetery revenue in the U.S. Independent businesses, along with other privately-owned consolidators, represent the remaining 77% of industry revenue.” If you own a funeral home, the 77% is you — and the 23% files a detailed report card every February that you can read for free.

There used to be a third name on this list. Park Lawn Corporation — the only publicly listed Canadian operator, with 175 funeral homes and 74 cemeteries at its last disclosure — was taken private in August 2024. Its final quarterly report covers the first three months of 2024. Nothing since. That’s the quiet lesson under this whole exercise: the industry’s public window is narrowing, and the useful response is to read the two reports that still print, closely. Both are free: SCI’s FY2025 10-K and Carriage’s FY2025 10-K.

The 2026 scoreboard, side by side

	SCI (FY2025)	Carriage Services (FY2025)
Revenue	$4.31B (+2.9%)	$417.4M (+3.3%)
Funeral / cemetery split	$2.41B / $1.90B	$269.2M / $148.2M (~65/35)
Footprint	1,485 funeral service locations · 500 cemeteries (312 combinations)	155 funeral homes · 28 cemeteries
Services (comparable)	347,696 performed (−0.8%)	43,523 contracts (−1.3%)
Average revenue per service	$5,823 (+2.9%)	$5,693 (+2.6%)
Cremation rate	64.4% (comparable)	60.8%
Margins	26.5% gross overall; funeral 20.9%, cemetery 33.8% (comparable)	35.1% gross overall; funeral 39.5%, cemetery 44.9% (adjusted operating)
Preneed backlog	$17.0B	93,286 funeral + 65,681 cemetery contracts (no dollar figure disclosed)
Capital moves	$464.2M buybacks · $0.34/qtr dividend · 3.67x leverage	Zero buybacks (third straight year) · $0.45/yr dividend · $532.9M total debt

One honest caveat before you quote any row at a conference: the two companies define their metrics differently. SCI’s per-service average excludes general-agency and non-funeral-home preneed revenue, over same-store locations only; Carriage’s is consolidated, excluding preneed interest; and Carriage’s “adjusted operating margin” is not the same instrument as SCI’s gross-profit percentage. Directionally comparable, never decimal-comparable.

The shared headline: growth is price, not volume

Both operators served fewer families in 2025 and earned more per family. SCI’s filing states it plainly: “a 2.9% growth in total average revenue per service, partially offset by a 0.8% decrease in total services performed.” Carriage’s table says the same thing in different clothes — contracts down 1.3%, average revenue per contract up 2.6% to $5,693.

Set that against the wider price environment. The National Funeral Directors Association’s newest published cost figures are still its 2023 Member General Price List Study: a median funeral with viewing and burial at $8,300, with cremation at $6,280 — increases of 5.8% and 8.1% over the two years to 2023, a stretch in which overall inflation ran 13.6%. Different measurement periods, same posture everywhere you look: nobody in this industry is outrunning inflation on price. (The NFDA medians are consumer package prices; the operators’ averages blend a cremation-heavy case mix — different instruments, both worth having on your dashboard.)

So where does growth actually come from? Mix and attachment. SCI’s cemetery segment runs a 33.8% comparable gross margin against the funeral segment’s 20.9% — property and memorialization are the margin engine, which is why 312 of its locations are funeral-cemetery combinations. And cremation keeps climbing for everyone — 64.4% comparable at SCI, 60.8% at Carriage, against NFDA’s projected 63.4% national rate — so per-case economics ride on what’s attached to the case, not the disposition itself.

The owner translation:

• Track your own average revenue per case, split by burial and cremation, every month. The publics live and die by this number; most independents never write it down.
• Track attachment — receptions, tributes, memorialization, catering — as its own line. That’s the lever both filings are actually describing.
• If you’re near a cemetery, the combination question deserves a real look. The margin gap between the two segments is the widest number in either filing.

Carriage: the consolidator that got smaller

If your mental model of a public consolidator is “buys everything,” Carriage’s filing reads differently. It started 2023 with 171 funeral homes; it ended 2025 with 155. Last year alone it sold thirteen funeral homes and four cemeteries for $40.4 million — in its own words, “$59.0 million in strategic acquisitions while divesting $44.5 million in non-core assets,” reflecting “a deliberate focus on quality over quantity.” It has bought back zero shares for three straight years while paying down debt.

The operating system it kept is the part worth stealing. Carriage runs what its filing calls the “Standards Operating Model”: every location is led by a Managing Partner with day-to-day responsibility, measured against operational and financial “Standards,” and paid “a fixed percentage of the field-level earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization based upon the number and weighting of the standards achieved.” Its long-term incentive — the “Good to Great” program — rewards a Managing Partner whose funeral homes achieve a net revenue compound annual growth rate of at least 1% over five years.

Read that bar again: one percent, compounded, for five years, earns the bonus. Public-company discipline isn’t heroic growth — it’s never going backward. An independent can run the same play with a one-page scorecard per location, a named leader who owns it, and a share of the profit for hitting it.

SCI: the moat is the backlog

SCI’s scale numbers are familiar — about 700,000 families served a year, an estimated 18% share of North American industry revenue — but the number that explains the company is the backlog: “our preneed backlog of unfulfilled funeral and cemetery contracts was $17.0 billion and $16.0 billion at December 31, 2025 and 2024, respectively.” A billion dollars of future revenue added in one year, and the filing is candid about why it matters: “Preneed selling provides us with a strategic opportunity to gain future market share. We also believe it adds to the stability and predictability of our revenue and cash flows.”

The cash machine underneath: $942.8 million of operating cash flow in 2025, funding $101.3 million of acquisitions (22 funeral service locations, 2 cemeteries), $464.2 million of share repurchases, and a growing dividend — all at a 3.67x leverage ratio against a 5.00x covenant ceiling.

The owner translation is direct: preneed is future market share, purchased today. Your version isn’t a trust portfolio — it’s the monthly seminar, the church partnership, the follow-up list. But the largest operator in the industry just told you, in an SEC filing, that the backlog is the moat. (How independents beat SCI locally is its own playbook.)

Park Lawn: what the exit teaches

Park Lawn’s ending has two chapters, and both carry a lesson.

Chapter one: the prune. In December 2023 it sold 72 cemeteries and 11 funeral homes to an affiliate of Everstory Partners for $70 million and used the cash to cut its leverage ratio to 1.95x. Chapter two: the exit. In June 2024, an affiliate of Homesteaders Life Company and Birch Hill Equity Partners agreed to acquire the company at C$26.50 per share — roughly C$1.2 billion including debt, “a 62.1% premium to the closing price.” The deal closed August 9, 2024; the shares were delisted within days, and the company applied “to cease to be a reporting issuer and to terminate its public reporting obligations.”

Lesson one is about what buyers pay for: a 62% premium landed on a pruned, deleveraged book. Portfolio discipline got priced, in cash, at the closing table.

Lesson two is about the rest of us. Park Lawn’s last full-year print was 2023 revenue of $347.6 million, up 6.6%. Its last report of any kind covered the first quarter of 2024. When a public operator goes private, its data goes with it — every consolidation takes numbers out of print. Benchmark while the filings are free.

The backdrop: price transparency is coming from customers, not Washington

The FTC’s Funeral Rule modernization is still at the prerule stage — an advance notice in November 2022, a workshop in 2023, and since then nothing but routine paperwork extensions. No proposed rule has ever issued.

The agency’s most recent real action is the one worth an owner’s attention: a November 2024 staff report on its first undercover phone sweep. Calling 278 randomly selected providers, staff couldn’t obtain price information from 26% of them after business hours (7% even during business hours); half answered pricing questions with estimates or ranges rather than actual prices; and at least 37 providers quoted different prices for the same service on different calls. The FTC’s earlier website survey found fewer than 40% of funeral provider sites post any prices at all.

The competitive read writes itself. Publish your prices. Train whoever answers your phone to quote them, the same way, every time. Regulation or not, you’d be ahead of a quarter of the market by breakfast — and the families comparison-shopping at 9 p.m. will find exactly one straight answer.

Your one-page tracker

The whole exercise fits on a page, updated each February when the 10-Ks land (and quarterly if you like):

• Scale and mix: your case count and cremation rate vs. SCI’s 64.4% / Carriage’s 60.8% / NFDA’s 63.4% national projection.
• Unit economics: your average revenue per case (by disposition) and attachment rate vs. the $5,693-$5,823 band the publics printed this year.
• Preneed: contracts written and your backlog count vs. last year — direction matters more than size. SCI just added a billion dollars to its future; your version is measured in files, and it compounds the same way.
• Balance sheet: your debt service and any expansion plans against the rate cycle — noting that the best-priced exit of the decade belonged to the operator that deleveraged first.
• Execution: one scorecard per location, one owner per scorecard, reviewed monthly — the Standards Operating Model at independent scale.

The public companies publish their numbers so you don’t have to guess at the industry’s direction. Two still do. Read them each February, borrow what compounds, and let your independence do what their scale can’t.